SI Archives Part 3: Stalin's Lunacy
by Guardian54
Summary: Stalin finally started World War Three, it would be a conflict that cost over twice the number of lives WWII did... Red Alert 1 events covered to the very end. Continuation of Archives Part 2, enjoy. M rated for grotesque imagery in Ch 10.
1. A False Start

A/N: Am following tradition of posting first chapter of sequel just before the last chapter of a fic, which is what I do so long as I plan on continuing that series of fics in the immediate future.

My idea of the first Soviet Heavy Tank (T-50 edition) visually resembles the real T-55. The T-55 in the story however is bulkier, heavier armoured, lacks a coaxial machine gun to make the turret crew work out despite cramping, has two 105mm guns, and a rather more square turret when seen from the front. It is however still only well-armoured in the frontal arc, like most of the T-series tanks, unlike SI tanks, which had up to the T-1955 been uniformly armoured on all sides, though slopes differ. Note that the T-55 is not QUITE the Soviet Heavy Tank as seen in-game, though it will still initially trounce Allied Medium Tanks 1v1, it will undergo improvements to be able to survive the alpha strike of its real enemy, the 1955. That change however will likely give us the T-58 or something.

BTW: Jane is the one who actually handles most of the R&D monitoring, and the MCV-1956 is not equipped with "minor" firepower… the WTC-110-65A is a gun to be reckoned with.

BE WARNED OF WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GAME MECHANICS DO NOT APPLY! Similar PWNAGE, but with roles more or less reversed, will occur with the introduction of Mammoth Tanks. However, some of the more absurd weapons will be downplayed i.e. the MAD tank.

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><p>Chapter 1: A False Start<p>

_Canada/US Eastern Time Zone 0700 hours (Germany 1300 hours) December 25, 1956_

Jane yawned as she finished brushing her teeth and put on her morning clothes, different from her work clothes. Customarily, the Shepard family took their showers in the evening and didn't waste time with soaking in baths, her parents usually using the saved time to fool around like randy teenagers and herself to work the business harder. She found her parents' sexuality very surprising, but maybe not considering they expected another 50 to 70 years to live, if family stories about "pure-breeding" were accurate. Her grandparents were still all alive, for example, and could expect another 10 or 20 years. Still, meeting other siblings and realizing you're old enough to be their mother or in one case grandmother is very disconcerting… and she'd already had to do it twice.

It was of course not nearly as disconcerting as the phone call she got when she was ready to leave for work. It was a direct call from Hannah, who was in the field in Germany. "Jane, it's started, Stalin's made his move, and we are rushing to hammer his dick into mush before he gets delusions of grandeur with all the waving around he's trying to do with it." Hannah stated, making the redheaded sister snort.

"How big a move and when?"

"It started just ten minutes ago, the first incoming reports. The men stopped complaining about staying on-duty on Christmas once the crap hit the fan. We're moving to intercept Soviet forces crossing all along the Oder. Make sure at some point in the next few days that Eisenhower knows what's happening and talk with him about American involvement, the Europeans should already know. We need to raise another division or two, Jane, at least six divisions are needed in Europe to ensure we can hold through the next winter."

"Are you sure you have enough troops to make it through this winter?" Jane was wondering about where she would get the recruits, most likely from Canada, since the recruitment in the Client States was saved for long-term demand, as the training facilities were all in Canada. It wasn't affordable bringing people overseas for training if you wanted results fast, and the client states' own Self-Defence Forces, trained on-site by SI troops, tended to be sufficient to afford with drawing some SI troops from them.

"Not sure, I believe so, if I have to I'll bring a Field Division over from Korea, but I'll get back to you after the opening engagements. If the Soviet armour quality is anything like what I remember… they're fucked." That would shave down the Korean garrison force to two divisions as Fourth Division had already been put in Algeria as a garrison for the new client state while the government finished reorganizing and began training their own Self-Defence Force. It was one of the big benefits of signing up as a Client State, less money was needed to maintain a self-defence force than a full Army, and they could call down a metaphorical giant hammer for help.

"Agreed, still steel… what is everyone thinking?"

"I think they're trying to look for a very good ceramic instead of making do with what we have." Hannah stated. That was how the Raider I had started with its ceramic tile armour layer. They had used glorified bathroom tiles, then decided to change things around a bit by finding the best available ceramics. Then came figuring out their components and grinding the clay a lot finer before making the ceramic. That had provided a marked improvement in shatter resistance and energy absorption on pulverization, in addition to superior HEAT particle stream erosion (i.e. they stopped High Explosive Anti-Tank shells better). This was part of why the composite armours were so much more expensive than conventional steel and not yet adapted by others, they seemed to be looking for a cheaper solution.

"Well yeah, I know how costly it can be to mass-produce good ceramic parts even with our cost reduction methods" namely that meant small, relatively thin tiles instead of trying to make bricks of good ceramic, using economy of scale, and obtaining the materials by bulk purchase. "Anyhow, sis, I'm stepping up production ASAP, back to wartime production of the T-1955s, eh? 300 a month sound good to you?"

"400 vehicles a month would be ideal, but that's not possible is it?" That was the projected wartime production capability for the T-1955 if the production of other tanks, namely cash cow Raider IIDs, were dropped for now. Gunter would understand, since he'd still get the tanks he'd ordered, though they'd be used ones passed down from her troops, and get far more potent armoured support from her.

"Nope."

"Well, 300 will have to do then."

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><p>Archivists' Note: Today, many claim that this was one of the first practical attempts to create nano-crystalline materials, however, inspection of remaining ceramic tiles fitted to Raider Is and IIs, donated to museums, reveal that they merely reduced the grain size of the particles by a factor of about 50 compared to typical bathroom tiles of the day, whereas nano-crystalline materials demand a reduction of 10,000 times most of the time.<p>

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><p>Meanwhile, in Washington DC, Eisenhower was looking through the reports of the latest nuisance protests in the South, which were no longer as large or as powerful as before. These became quite feeble once the Protected Vans that had been in Montgomery, Alabama were paraded around with the bullet damage to their external frames clearly visible and many, many bullet craters or lodged bullets in their inner armour. The public had literally demanded legislation for more severe punishments against hate crimes after seeing those post-apocalyptic vehicles driving around. Well, he knew how Hannah Shepard stayed in business, there were always hot potato problems around the world that needed solving, and she could do it and make everyone involved <em>look good at the same time<em> while doing the right thing.

After his WWII experience, Eisenhower had a lot of respect for the woman, and also for racial equality—equity was another thing entirely, he agreed with her that it should never be enforced as people are NOT the same, even though they are equal. Well, he was actually pretty happy when she explained on national television what a corner the United States government was in and how it could not take sides in a civil dispute, ending with "You don't want another Civil War just because people don't want to ride the buses in one city, do you?" That had successfully mollified most people and aroused some more sympathy for the government, plus support for her Peacekeeping forces.

His phone rang and he picked it up "Hello."

"Mr. President, this is Major General Ben Carville, European Allied Supreme Command. We have a situation here… as of 1240 hours local time, and that's twenty-five minutes ago, one of our forward outposts went dark, and as of 1255 hours, ten minutes ago, we detected two large Soviet armoured contingents this side of the border of Poland. Soviet infantry and motorized columns are also pressing across the river all along its length and headed for the Oder Line."

"That's…" _exactly what Hannah thought might happen with all the Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe_ "That's pretty ugly, have they engaged yet?"

"If you don't count the forward outposts near the Oder, sir, no, but with all due respect, as of 0640 hours on the East Coast, White House Time, we have been at war with the United Soviet Socialist Republics sir, and I don't think Stalin will have his troops sit back and appreciate us stall-'in for time."

Eisenhower snorted at the pun "Great, well, here comes World War Three, I'll start getting the broadcasts and everything ready. Do you have enough forces to deal with the enemy?"

"Hell no, but we'll be able to hold them in Germany… for maybe a month by my estimate with technically Allied forces. On the other hand, Shepard called a few minutes ago regarding giving us a helping hand, and her new tanks… I would not want to be on the receiving end of one of those bad boys. If she performs as well as she did in the last war, we'll be able to hold them at least until spring. Of course, that's if the Soviets don't just swamp us. The Balkans are another matter entirely…"

"Alright, I'll get recruitment and stuff going, hold down the fort in Germany, Ben, you got me?"

Carville nodded on the other side of the line "Sir, yes, sir."

"Good luck Ben."

"Good luck to you too, Mr. President."

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><p><em>Central Europe, December 25-31, 1956<em>

The Soviets had initial success when they crossed the Oder for one reason only: Infantry and MCVs. They'd been able to deploy a force into the battlefield near two destroyed bridges and used those to allow the infantry to ford the river and overwhelm a small border guard outpost, thus establishing a beachhead and allowing greater Soviet forces to cross. They had however GROSSLY underestimated the strength of the primary defence line and been smashed to paste against it. Their Scud missile launchers were inaccurate enough at anything except point-blank range and slow enough to reload that they really weren't helping as much as had been hoped, though they were still methodically reducing the border fortifications one by one while the German armoured units did their best to lash back.

Being equipped with up-armoured (part of the multimillion-dollar maintenance contracts the Wehrmacht bought from SI along with the vehicles) Raider Is installed with the latest model of the 95mm guns that had won so many engagements in World War II allowed the German armour to hit back hard, well more than matching the two-gun Soviet Heavy Tanks in armour, but still only equalling a bit more than half the power of the twin 105mm guns the Soviets had, though the Allied guns fired faster and had longer barrels calibre-wise. However, it was noted that the Soviet tanks did not have coaxial machine-guns, in favour of better armour coverage and less weak points, mounting the heavy machine-gun, which almost all tanks had, on the top of the turret instead. Hence they were found to be vulnerable to infantry attacks, and the border guards used this to great effect, though Soviet Grenadier and Riflemen squads (more like mobs) proved a rather significant threat to Allied infantry. As for the lighter German tanks, they had Panthers, Shermans, etc. left over from the last war fitted with the newest 75mm guns SI produced specifically for this purpose. According to the surrender terms from eight years ago, Germany could not design and field any new armoured vehicles. However, that did not prevent Germany from refitting old ones or buying used vehicles from other factions (ahem).

The used Raider IIs on the line, all at D standard now, were able to match up to the new Heavy Tanks very well, despite the base design being ten years older (the variant though was only one year older), and could fight them one-on-one evenly if need be. However the true German trump card came when the four SI Field Divisions that were mobilized arrived on the line at the two main Soviet breakthrough points. Seventh and Eighth were at the one east of Berlin, in the low ground northwest of the Frankfurt that was on the Oder (the less known Frankfurt), Ninth and Tenth got the one northeast of Dresden near Cottbus. Eleventh Field Division was left northwest of Dresden, east of Leipzig, to react to any further problems as they cropped up, especially if the Czechs buckled. The Czech Republic was falling down, but it wasn't going without a fight. The Soviets were paying in blood for every millimeter of Czech soil they dared take. Anyhow, Soviet T-55s were rallied in the breakthrough zones to face the threat of the A-T-1955s, and the two contemporaries met in a thundering orchestra of the sounds of war.

Namely that meant the whooshes of rocket artillery on both sides, A-WAR-150-40B (Army, Weapon-Artillery-Rocket, 150mm rockets, 40 per volley, Second Model) and BM-21 fire crisscrossing between the lines. Scud launchers firing once in a while and ending their short flights in thunderous explosions combined with the rocket artillery and formed the less persistent parts of the woodwind section. The always-present parts of the clarinets and flutes were filled in by the whoosh of infantry rocket launchers on both the Allied and Soviet sides, plus the rocket launcher racks mounted on SI's venerable but constantly updated APCs. The brass section was made of the tank guns clashing and constant explosions of the background, and the percussion came in the form of shells hitting vehicle armour. Every few moments a crescendo would come with a vehicle of some description cooking off as the 1200-plus tanks of the first divisions to receive T-1955s were put to good use, despite only a half of the vehicles being T-1955s.

Fielding 11 Field Divisions, each with over 600, almost 700 tanks, was a tall order, even more so in that peacetime tank production only amounted to 160 vehicles a month. The T-1955 had been in production for only 15 months, for a total of 2400 vehicles, about a third of what was needed to fully outfit the front-line armies. Fifth Division, in Palestine, had been fully outfitted with the new tanks to act as a main strike force if the need arose in the Middle East. This meant that the European units, tallying a bit over 3500 tanks if one counted the independent aviation brigades around, had 1700 T-1955s at their disposal, all unpacked and combat-ready. Though that meant that it was not an option for commanders to assemble more at a War Factory, they could still assemble Raider IIDs.

The A-T-1955 and T-55 matchup was a totally different story from the fairly even Raider-series match-ups. The SI tank weighed almost twice as much as its adversary (and most of its Allied compatriots) and was equipped with a bit more glacis and turret armour (but nearly 3 times the hull armour other than the glacis and turret) as the T-55. Of course, this was talking total outer and main armour for the T-1955, but that made the match even more unbearable for the Soviets when HEAT shells were employed. Sabots were lower in penetration but better in accurate range, especially with the 110mm smoothbore guns the 1955 used, though the penetrator design was still apparently inadequate to pierce the enemy's glacis with glancing shots at long ranges. The gun power aspect resulted in the T-55 only outgunning its opponent by half a gun in tank-to-lighter-tank battles.

This was as several old, scrapped German tank wrecks had been used for SI's gunnery testing, and a good lined-up shot could nail two in one shot for the 110mm gun's sabot. In glorified terms, the Soviets could kill two lighter tanks per volley, and the T-1955 could nail 1.5 vehicles as an average, given good aiming. In direct confrontation, the guns were far, FAR different. The Soviets were still using HVAP (High Velocity Armour Piercing) rounds instead of armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabots (APFSDS or just "sabot") for God's sake!

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><p>AN: You want to see one-sided war, go read Tom Clancy's "Executive Orders", in reality, T-80s will NOT be killed by Abrams sabot shells, fired from Rheinmetall L55 120mm guns, at very long ranges! They need to be closer to score a frontal kill… At least I'm using numbers that make sense with then tech and now tech… and don't tell me I'm speeding things too much, go look up real history, crunch numbers, and realize how much effort, computer power, and composite materials will be needed to create the first, very crude, Chronosphere even in WWIV in the early 80s. (If the Chronosphere already existed, why protect Einstein's Black Forest lab?)

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><p>However the 55 was severely outgunned in fighting unarmoured vehicles or infantry depending on the secondary weapon the 1955 in question was fitted with, be it a 40mm auto-cannon or flamethrower. The 1955 also had a coaxial machine gun, unlike the T-55, which enabled it to handle infantry with far greater ease than the lighter tank. The new model of dozer blade, rather larger (to accommodate the larger tank), sharper, and with a more pronounced V-shape, did not help one bit in making things more balanced. It just worked as ANOTHER layer of hold-off armour, in addition to the slat armour (glorified thick chicken cages) and outer armour.<p>

In less glorified terms, the T-1955 had a crushing advantage in armour protection, mobility, and single-shot firepower, and, in these two engagements, which began before the Soviets could get too many forces across the Oder, numbers. It was less of an engagement than a massacre, since the SI tanks charged in loose formation as the German lines peeled back for them like the Red Sea. T-1955s ploughed Soviet infantry aside and apart, firing on the move against any Soviet vehicles they sighted and scoring a good handful of kills, losing none of their own numbers in the process as the Soviets weren't good at hitting mobile targets. Even when they were close enough to hit properly with the more primitive Soviet gun-sights, the T-1955s shrugged off the shots, even if it was to their flanks, with their thick flank armour and fired back into the thin sides of the Soviet T-55s. This resulted in hundreds of T-55 kills at either battle site and only a handful of T-1955s even disabled by the hostile tanks, in one case comically when a T-55 turret, blown off in a catastrophic kill, had landed, upside-down, on top of a T-1955's turret and broke down the gun sights and periscopes. The top-side armour was arranged in three layers to maximize protection with as little weight as possible (though the tank still weighed in at 100 tons) and so functioned well in protection against big explosives and even in blunt trauma. The hold-off slats atop the outermost layer could crumple enough to absorb most of the damage for blunt trauma.

Interestingly, that system had come about during the First Palestine War when Raider IIs entering Damascus had been attacked from above—resulting in Damascus basically being levelled along the entry roads of the tanks—with everything from rockets to boulders. It was proving its use here though as the vehicles soaked up damage and doled it out to the badly outnumbered Soviets. Several MiG strikes on the area scored hits on the tanks, but only one was actually destroyed, the rest surviving by virtue of topside armour despite taking damage. It was a one-sided melee of vehicles, which allowed maximum fire concentration by SI vehicles instead of battle line style warfare where both sides can only present so many vehicles and guns. The final tally came to 700-some Soviet vehicles, mostly T-55s, lost against seven T-1955s completely destroyed (these were stripped for remaining armour plating and whatever parts could be extracted from the wreckage, then towed off for scrap metal), plus 22 more disabled. SI's APC losses were actually lower, because they used cover, only had to deal with Soviet stragglers and picket units, and of course stayed out of the way more.

This came from what should have been obvious reasons to any number-cruncher. The High-Velocity-Armour-Piercing (HVAP) round of the Soviet 105mm gun could have over fifty percent of its mass penetrate through 280mm of RHA at 100 meters i.e. point-blank range. The High-Explosive-Anti-Tank (HEAT) shell could penetrate about 350mm RHA at that range. The T-1955's armour coverage, on all sides, totalled in at 350mm even if one didn't factor in the effect of the hold-off space, which was in fact significant, there was also the fact that it was ceramic composite, much stronger than plain steel. Using the sabot round recently developed for the A-WTC-110-65A gun the T-1955 could reliably penetrate perpendicularly a bit under 600mm of RHA at ramming range (20-30 meters), which meant that the tank's own side armour at its weakest, namely in the track pods, was only just able to take a shot from another such tank at such close range.

The rest of the armour, due to sloping, was able to take the 110mm gun's shots okay, but the pods had the 300mm main armour on the hull and 50mm outer armour **near vertical** to the ground! That lack of lots of angling was the main problem, which meant that the armour could only barely hold off a sabot. Fortunately the ground clearance of the hull meant that a shot wouldn't be able to dive under a pod's outside armour and hit the hull, at least, not high enough to penetrate the tank, but the idea still held. In other words, at longer range than the Soviets could engage at, a direct hit to the 300mm STEEL fronts of the T-55s was a likely kill shot (and any side or turret side shot was effectively sudden death), while return fire, even in effective range of the Soviet guns was decisively NOT and often just lodged in the main armour, doing nothing much. The T-55s were bulky to accommodate twin main armaments, and had been designed conventionally, with thin armour everywhere except the glacis and turret front, whereas the T-1955 didn't have either problem. Then again, the bigger, far heavier tank was also more expensive to produce than the smaller, lighter one, go figure.

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><p>AN: In real life, the Rheinmetall 120mm gun, at 55 calibres long, is supposedly able to easily penetrate 900mm of RHA at point-blank (probably like 100m or a bit more). Given a smaller calibre but significantly longer barrel, a sabot should be about the same for both guns in terms of muzzle energy, if not more for the smaller gun. With a more primitive discarding sabot, plus crappier ceramic armour that's not as durable as today's, it is reasonable to declare a zilch-range (I literally mean only 20 or 30 meters between muzzle and target) penetration of 600mm steel, which can be stopped by 350mm of composite armour with 70cm space between them for the 60cm treads (with some clearance left over). It is also reasonable to say that a tank uniformly armoured so well on all sides would weigh 100 tons and require a 2500 horsepower engine to give it about 65-70 km/h top speed, given the Leopard 2 at 55 tons needs a 1500 hp engine for about 72 km/h top speed, only really limited by the tracks' durability.

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><p>The seven totally destroyed T-1955s had mostly been from a hail of Scud missile, BM-21, and Soviet heavy artillery fire (even then it took some time to get that many kills) which had been snuffed out by detachments of APCs fording the Oder and scrapping the artillery and missile launchers (the APCs didn't choose to call in artillery support). They finished and got away back behind Allied lines before the Soviets, then victimized in a gang rape session of main battle tanks, could react. Soviet forces on the west of the Oder were completely annihilated by the 27th of December, 1956, while the situation steadily deteriorated in the Czech Republic and Austria. The two countries were resisting the Soviet juggernaut with all they had, but that was not enough.<p>

The four SI Field Divisions were pulled off the Oder lines in the ensuing weeks as more German armoured and infantry units arrived to hold the front. They headed south, in response to the Soviet forces grinding up through the Czech Republic and Austria. The United Nations was bogged down in the bureaucracy of ejecting the Soviet Union, so it couldn't do jack shit until at least February, and it was up to the Allies to hold the Soviets. Austria, being formally neutral, had to be fortified by more elite units if it was to be held and not allow the Soviets to totally outflank Germany. In less glorified terms, Gunter von Esling, now European Allied Supreme Commander, was faced with the highly unsavory task of needing to invade Austria to secure it.

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><p><em>White House, December 26, 1956<em>

Moments after he called another meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss new reports of Soviet armoured performance, he got another phone call while they were just assembled in the White House conference room in question. "This is Jane Shepard, is this President Eisenhower?"

The President of the United States picked up the microphone as the incoming call was being put over the big speaker in the room "Yep, it's me, Jane, is there something you wanted?"

"Just calling to inform you that Hannah will use all forces she has on-hand to support the Allies in the Central Europe Front. We may need to withdraw Third Division from North Korea, and with the DMZ moved north in the final agreement…" It was equidistant between Pyongyang and Seoul with the final peace agreement "Can you exert some pressure on the South Koreans to not attempt anything immensely stupid? China's too busy worrying about the USSR to bother with North Korea now that the soviets invaded Mongolia, so my main concern is Syngman Rhee."

"Hold on, let me talk to the Joint Chiefs about it, this may take a few moments."

"Alright, I'll call back in ten minutes then." She hung up.

He looked around the conference room after putting the microphone down "Is she right about the Chinese?"

The Chiefs of Staff nodded one by one, though some seemed rather skeptical about it, they could see how it would make sense. The Chinese and Soviets had growing tensions between them and the Chinese would naturally be wary of their northern neighbour. "She's right, Mr. President. She's right about her Korean garrison too, we can't get our armies up to the front that fast, but she can."

Eisenhower frowned "That says something about our armies, doesn't it?"

"Sir, our best guess is that the Shepards will move Sixth Division up to Germany, matching it up with the newest shipments of those T-1955s and selling the extra Raider IIDs to the Germans basically on the spot, and then replace its presence in Palestine with Third Division, by that estimate, she could get a large armoured contingent to the front faster than we could. Otherwise, we would be speedier in reaching the front. However the psychological impact of our armour is, to be frank sir, nothing like the T-1955."

"Go over the specs with me again, why is it not so much of an impact?"

"For one, the T-1955 is much larger, about 4.5 meters or 15 feet wide, three feet more than our tanks" The M48 was 3.65m wide "It's about nine point five meters or 32 feet long with the hull and even more obese with the gun pointed forward counted, it weighs 2.2 times as much as an M48" those weighted 45 metric tons whereas the T-1955 weighed 100 metric tons. "The armour plates are ridiculously thick and durable, and can shrug off anything short of heavy artillery, big bombs, or tactical missiles, typical rockets below 6 or 7 inches diameter will not be likely to penetrate them even from the top. The power plant is… a monster of a machine, but it keeps the vehicle going much faster than our tanks can hope to manage. It's an expensive machine, but it works well, though it can be swarmed to death like the Tiger tanks of the last war against our Shermans, given enough targets thrown at it. The one big drawback besides lower production rates is that other than using ships or under its own power, it is absurdly hard to transport around the battlefield, being too heavy for battle-ready rail transport or air transport. However, any areas too deep for it to just snorkel across will be more than deep enough for deployment of transport ships, so…"

Eisenhower frowned "In other words, they have a machine that totally kicks ass, a machine that we don't. How did this happen? Army R&D needs to get its ass back in gear."

"Sir, the head start they've had ever since the days of the T-1936 is difficult to catch up with, but we are doing our best, it's just that we have so many other commitments…"

"I understand… we're a country, not a paramilitary" he meant that in the form of any military group formally without direct national affiliation, a classification which technically included police, coast guard, and so on forces "group, so we need different things to handle different jobs instead of making do. I just wish that our specialized equipment was better than their all-purpose hardware. I am also very glad they are on the Allies' side."

There was an awkward silence in the room for a few moments before someone stated "At least we have the _Forrestal_ and _Saratoga_ commissioned, and the _Ranger_ has been launched. They're better than the SI Medium Carriers…"

Eisenhower snorted. _Yes, their MEDIUM Carriers, and we're classing our ships as the first of the Super Carriers. At full load, we only displace about ten thousand tons more and are one knot slower. We only really have the upper hand in aviation space because we're longer. Oh, and they are ten meters wider at the waterline than us, even though they're fifty meters shorter. We have 90 jets, while they can at best accommodate 50 or 60, but they are equipped with one hell of a lot more anti-aircraft armament… and even when surprised in-harbour are not helpless thanks to torpedo launchers and their 200mm guns. Hell, during the Algerian War the _Ontario_ made a supply run to Algeria as part of a supply convoy the French bought space on, just for the armoured and armed freighters, and functioned as an artillery battery for a whole day while the French were offloading goods, in addition to flying off airstrikes._ "Well, that's great, now what do you think of what Jane says?"

"It will maximize Allied armoured forces that can be used to meet the Soviets…"

Someone else chipped in "It also isn't too much trouble, South Korea needs a reminder that it's not the top of the world, I say go ahead."

"Does everyone agree?" They all nodded "then it's settled, now let's wait for Jane to call back before we talk about the Soviet armoured performance."

As soon as the phone rang Eisenhower hit the button to route the output through the room's speakers. "Hello Mr. President, Jane Shepard here, how are things on your end? And how's Syngman Rhee?"

"That tyrant in South Korea won't go anywhere so long as I'm still POTUS, Jane, don't worry about it, we would really appreciate it if you could transfer as many units as possible to Germany…" Eisenhower thought for a moment, it would be more cost-effective than deploying US units so… "We'll even pay you for the work."

"Thank you for your kind offer, Mr. President, we've already offered the European Allied Headquarters a contract, and they've signed off on the documents. It would be bad business to charge you again for services we have already agreed to perform."

"Sir, you'd better see this…" Someone stated, turning the TV to national news. It was a report on the initial total victories along the Oder, on how SI had signed a contract with the European Allied Supreme Command, and on SI's declaration that they would not charge other Allied governments for their services in this war. However, it did have a clause of "Donations of funds would be greatly appreciated."

The lack of a reply made Jane speak again "…Mr President? Are you still there?"

"Yes, thank you for your help, Jane Shepard, you're a true member of the Allies."

"Well, are you meeting with the Joint Chiefs right now? If you are, is the discussion something I can help with?"

"Yes, yes I am, we're about to talk about the performance of Soviet armour, any suggestions?"

"You ready for me to ramble a summary of what we've got?"

Eisenhower was obviously very happy about this "Yeah, go ahead."

"The T-55 tanks are very weak in any area outside of their forward arc, both on the hull and on the turret. The T-50 was worse, but it seems they made improvements to fight Raider IIs more evenly. The T-55 can survive, but only frontally, the alpha strike from our 95mm guns, though new sabot rounds with the design adapted for the smaller gun are beginning to show some results, often penetrating the frontal hull of the enemy on the alpha strike. The Allied 90mm gun, firing the sabots we sold you and the sabots you designed yourselves, should be able to effectively engage the T-55 directly given a few shots. However, it has the upper hand in firepower compared to an Allied tank, double the firepower in fact, and can effectively engage current Allied medium tanks. Light Tanks will be able to kill it with a flank shot from their guns, but only with sabot or HEAT ammunition, the latter needing near-vertical impact and the former needing a decent angle of entry instead of an oblique impact. Medium Tanks may or may not penetrate the T-55's glacis from the front with a sabot, depending on angle."

Interestingly, testing had found ceramic composite armour to not be very favoured by angling, unlike conventional steel armour, but sloping was still used anyways just to increase effective thickness, even though more tiles had to be replaced after a given impact, and the system had been changed to setting the tiles within a boxed-style metal frame (with a top and bottom that bit together) with only small amounts of glue, then setting the frame into the old plastic mesh setting. That had turned out in the gunnery tests to provide better protection than plain ceramic tiles. Still, with the pulverization/erosion effect of the ceramic, it was about four times as protective against HEAT rounds as an RHA plate of equal thickness, and two times as effective against sabots. Spaced armour proved effective against both types—and allowed T-1955 sides to survive friendly sabot fire—though more against HEAT shells, the main Soviet anti-armour shell.

"So basically we can engage them and win."

Jane's response was "Your tanks will take punishment, but yes, winning against them with your current tanks is very possible, though good strategy and engagement conditions will be required. However, their electronics and rangefinders are more primitive, so you have an edge in choosing your fights."

"Good, anything else you can help us with?" Eisenhower pressed.

"That's all the information I have, I hope it helped."

The POTUS nodded "Yes, it did, thank you for your help."

"I'll leave you to your meeting then."

"Understood, Jane Shepard, you can call again at any time."

"Goodbye, Mr. President."

"Goodbye" Eisenhower hit the off button for the phone and turned to the Joint Chiefs again "Now, where were we?"

* * *

><p><em>Allied European Supreme Command Headquarters, Bonn, Germany, January 1, 1957<em>

Bonn was basically, as dubbed by American, British, etc. members of the Allied European Supreme Command staff, "the Emergency Capital" of Germany. It was here that they were currently debating the Austrian problem, namely whether to invade it from Italy, Germany, both or neither. Nikos Stavros, a Greek by heritage and the representative of the collective Balkans states, was arguing for an invasion by Italy which could better cover Yugoslavia and the Balkans front. Ben Carville, the American representative, was adamantly standing his ground on entering Austria from Germany so as to make supporting the Czechs easier along the way. The French and British guys were basically opinion-less and had deferred the responsibility of decision-making onto Gunter.

The German (by heritage) Canadian general finally put up a hand, signalling that the two younger generals arguing before him should consider shutting up. "Enough, we will enter Austria from Germany."

"What will this do to Germany's public image?" The British man spoke up for once. "You will be seen as aggressors once more, and after the last war…"

Gunter cut him off "Better seen as aggressors than collectively enslaved to that lunatic Stalin. Besides, who ever said I was going to use German troops?"

"Ah, so you're going to…" Carville looked pointedly at the sixth member of their conference, who was a bit taller than him and with far more curves than all the rest put together.

"Yes, I am, Hannah, would you be so kind…"

Hannah Shepard smirked from her seat "No problem, as long as you can hold the line on the Oder I can go help Austria hold back the Soviet invasions."

"Great, well, please communicate that to your troops as soon as possible, we can take a five-minute intermission assuming there are no new developments?" No one had any new intel, so Gunter shrugged "See you in a moment, Hannah."

The woman nodded, heading out to order her troops to move out "See you guys in a moment."

Ben Carville spoke first after she left, smirking "Well, I think I just really gained some more insight as to how she stays in business… political deniability, eh Gunter? Just like Mr. President was doing down in Alabama, paying someone to pacify a volatile embarrassment…"

Von Esling kept a straight face "I have no idea what you are talking about, Ben."

The American chuckled at that. "Well, if her reputation's anything to go by she'll get the job done as long as we can hold the Czech border and the Oder Line…"

After the intermission, more problems came up "What do we do about the Balkans problem?" The Frenchman inquired.

Von Esling shook his head "There is little we can do, Yugoslavia is falling and its internal groups have been let loose on one another by the Soviets, They've already taken Zagreb all the way through to Belgrade and are advancing on Sarajevo. We don't have a chance of stopping them anywhere north of Greece on the Adriatic coast. In Bulgaria they've made it to Vratsa and cut off the Black Sea coastline, our troops there are fighting hard alongside the Bulgarian army and air force, but we are being steadily pushed back and I expect the capital to fall within a month. Our best hope is to set up a defence line stretching from somewhat west of Thessaloniki to the vicinity of Corfu on the west coast of Greece. We are extremely disadvantaged in the Balkans Front, so our best bet is to dig into Greece, hold the line, and wait for a chance to hit back. I've already authorized mass evacuations of those willing to come along with our troops to Greece and from there to Spain and France. It has to be done now if we want to get any significant portion of the population out."

"I remember the people of the Balkans are very attached to their homes…" Stavros stated, perplexed.

"I out-argued a lot of them, talking about preserving their cultures, they may be attached to their homelands, Nikos, but they are more attached to their cultures and given a good reason to save their own lives those who dislike Communism will do so." His eyes hardened a bit and all the generals understood, even the younger Carville, that those who liked Communism might as well stay and get themselves killed, sympathisers had to be eliminated as much as possible, and a nice brutal occupation tended to clear their heads, such as how the Irish once had a Nazi Party but decidedly did not after the occupation. "I learnt a lot from a very intelligent strategist." He looked straight down the table to the other end, and a pair of aged brown eyes in an always-young face smirked back at him and nodded acknowledgement.

"Mushy teacher-student bonding aside…" The British guy stated simply "We should push forward into Poland to destroy stockpiles of resources the Soviets must have built up in preparation for an overwhelming attack on Germany."

"The British Expeditionary Force can do that when they get here, Germany will be in no shape to launch an offensive until the spring thaw. Even with our reservists" That meant the younger members of the Wehrmacht back in WWII, those now aged 27-35 "being brought back into full active status en masse we still have to re-train them." Whoever had decided to purchase ten times the originally desired number of BR-54s (German Army designator for the SI Battle Rifles that came out in 1954) by adding an extra zero by accident at the end of the order would only receive a small admonishment instead of being demoted for wasting money, Gunter decided. He'd only recently found out about the fuck-up when Hannah asked him about it and said he was wise to stock up on the newest and best guns before an imminent war. "If we pull any active units out of our already overstretched lines, our defences will collapse and Germany will be overrun. France still needs to mobilize and militarize, and no you are not getting any of the old Raider Is that we patched back up back." He glared at the French man "You phased out a very good medium tank for a light tank and sold the vehicles to us, then we bought the maintenance contracts that kept them modernized as much as possible out of our own budget!" The French man, whose mouth was half-open, hurriedly shut it.

The British man grimaced "I hope the German Army can hold the Soviets until we can join in."

"Believe me, we own enough Raider-series tanks instead of your medium tanks that we will be able to hold the Soviets just fine." That was because no one else had been willing to sell their tanks, mainly Centurions and M48s, to the German Army, and so Gunter had secured by ex-employee benefits a contract to buy up the Raider Is that no one else seemed to want anymore once the Second World War was over. Then he'd bought up the Raider IIDs whenever they became available on the market, to outfit his own armoured units. Other countries had been a bit nervous about the development and questioned Hannah Shepard's judgement, but it had worked out in the end since she knew what Gunter was doing with them.

* * *

><p><em>Austria, January 2, 1957<em>

The Austrian government wasn't too happy about being invaded from the rear while they were trying to and epically failing at fighting the Soviet armies grinding their way across the country from the east. The colloquial term several decades later among said government's by-then-retired members for this event was "ass-raped", go figure. But it had to be done, and the fact that it was probably the best-equipped Allied army and not Germany, Italy or a Western Allied nation coming in helped greatly. Austria had seen its fair share of damage from the Western Allies back in the last war as it was on the Axis side then… well, annexed by Germany at the time but whatever. It had also resented the Axis countries greatly for bringing it into the war on the losing side, so basically right now it was being semi-occupied by the one Allied side that it didn't despise while the Soviets were violating the eastern end of the country.

That violation was quite literal as the Soviets rolled across the countryside raping, pillaging, and murdering random settlements while leaving others completely alone seemingly on a whim. Anything that resisted was killed and levelled as the Red Army thundered across the land like the Mongol Horde. But like every so-called "unstoppable force", it met an actual "immovable object" and stopped catastrophically. Halfway between Salzburg and Vienna, on the shores of the Danube, the main Soviet thrust up the Danube valley toward Munich was stopped dead in its tracks when SI forces were pulled out of seemingly nowhere to fight them.

The T-1955s had hidden in the woods of the valley or dug themselves into basically hull defilade positions, small, short ditches deep enough to hide their hulls completely (covered by snow on the side facing the road, except the periscopes) while still showing their periscopes over the ramparts at the ends and able to drive either forward or back out of one up onto flat ground. Many had also sheltered in the river, in the shallows near both banks, snorkels scattered among the reeds and underbrush on the edges of the river banks, and when half the Soviets had passed them, they struck, four powerful, wide track pods launching them from the water and ditches into battle.

The rear units came under attack at the same time from T-1955s that had bypassed the northern shore's Soviet units and forded the river further east using several ruined bridges and dumped rubble to make the water shallow enough to wade instead of snorkel (though snorkels were still put up as a precautionary measure). The forward units on the south side of the river had no choice other than to wheel back to help the rear units, leaving a hollow front line of vehicles as a vanguard to dig in alongside a few infantry regiments. That digging-in group soon came under a withering hail of coordinated 150mm rocket and 100mm light howitzer fire that shook the snowy earth. Behind the nearby hills on both sides of the river were snowdrifts… moving snowdrifts whose 95m guns individually performed somewhat better than the Soviet 105mm guns.

Winter camouflage painted Raider IIDs (they only had so many T-1955s available…) moved into the open and fired upon the remaining Soviet tanks ten minutes after the bombardment began. These "old" but thoroughly modernized tanks had to compensate for perceived inadequacy in armour by facing their foes at a slight angle (by doctrine to maximize glacis and flank armour RHA equivalency), though still handily out-performing their opponents in that respect. Many of the Soviet tanks had already been sent ahead to find and destroy the artillery—they would be met by numerous recently-deployed Gun Turrets and be dealt with abruptly—and the rest, fighting on less than even numbers, didn't stand a chance.

As for how the hell so many separate detachments of tanks were used, well, five divisions added up to something like 3200-3300 or so tanks, with 1700 T-1955s among them. This meant that the utter melee in the valley on both sides of the Danube just downriver from Linz was very well-supplied with armoured vehicles and ensured SI numerical superiority at any and all engagement sites. The T-1955 spots never really needed that, so superior was their armour protection and one-shot-killing capacity so long as the shot was a direct hit (or any shot to the side/rear that passed through anything vital), but it was nice anyways. The final tally was still only a handful of T-1955s disabled or damaged, none totally destroyed, and a handful of Raider IIDs lost in combat against the Soviet vehicles despite numerical superiority. The kill-to-loss ratios were obscenely high (the definition of loss had to be expanded to disabled vehicles so as to not fill in "Undefined" in the report for the T-1955s) in the areas where T-1955s had been fielded and quite high even when they were not, thanks to foolish Soviet doctrine, political commissars, and thin sides and rears on the T-55s.

According to the reports of the German observers following with the SI divisions to coordinate any air support if needed, "The Soviets left their asses and flanks hanging out in the open, and Shepard's tanks with their big, hard [core] guns decided to shove a few sabots up theirs to punish them for public indecency." This brought some much-needed hilarity to Allied Supreme Command in the grim and trying times of the day, as it was quite obvious what the observers were saying.

The Soviets only got garbled messages about a massive ambush and were cut off from aerial observation of the battlefield by an SI fighter sweep, so by the time any real recon data came in the ambushers had covered their tracks and retreated. They headed to the general defence line they'd begun to set up which ran mostly south from Linz into the Alps and then followed the Italian border. They were taking with them the wreckage, often hacked up by thermal cutters—which were also used for repairing vehicles as welders—of the Soviet vehicles for scrap steel plate that could potentially be useful for building tanks or fortifications in Germany's factories. The rearguard towed behind them tree branches, rakes and such to stir up the packed snow and reduce their tracks a bit, not difficult considering the snow that was falling all around them as they trooped by, covering up their tracks further. Certainly the Soviets would find the tracks given some effort, but it would slow them as they tried to follow the tracks, especially with the mines the rearguard units laid down, guaranteed to blow infantry apart or blow a tread off a tank.

Given the simple, robust (but not very protective) construction of the T-55, a badly busted tread was enough to be a mobility kill that would take at least quite a few minutes to fix up. By contrast, even without clearing mines by Dozer Blade, any Raider-series tank or T-1955 could roll its way over an average minefield. Sure, it would come out limping along and the front pods would likely require a lot of repairs before they could function again, but at least it would still be combat-mobile and able to move along without being bogged down… much. There were reasons why the hull bottom on the four-pod tanks was shaped to maximize contact area and minimize ground pressure should the front or rear end need to be dragged along. Namely, that was because busted pods, if both of the front or rear ones were busted, tended to sink into the ground enough that the hull would touch the ground, and that was better for relieving the ground pressure on the track-less wheels than not having a flat bottom hull.

A few lessons learnt from the Raider I through IIC meant that the Raider IID and T-1955 were equipped with some innovations. The double bottom hull with a fairly thick padding layer in between meant that mines hitting the hull would need to be very lucky and very large to be able to punch through, also protecting against shots when the tank went over a hill. The bottom was overly armoured according to many (100mm inner composite hull, 200mm spacing with some triangular support girders for honeycomb construction, 50mm outer hull), but the big, wide tracks offset that problem enough that the tank still retained good mobility. Jane, who had pushed for that design aspect, hoped the thick bottom would be vindicated by experience with landmines. Vehicles in past battles dragging themselves along on only one track pair had sometimes been disabled or even destroyed by anti-tank mines to their relatively vulnerable bellies. With the Raider II's D edition, and the T-1955, it would take a very large landmine to have a chance of getting through. What was worth noting was that the change in armour could be observed on the inside of the T-1955, as the less armoured part had a deck 20cm lower than the more armoured parts (to maintain a uniform outer hull layer).

* * *

><p><em>Central Europe, Early 1957<em>

Hopefully the defence lines, the Oder and Linz Lines, would hold the Soviets for some time while five very annoying Field Divisions marauded across the border of the Czech Republic, being let past hastily by the border guards once they noted the approach of the "Distinctive Steel and Red Maple Leaf Sea" phenomenon. Of course, they had to first explain that they were here to help fight the Soviets, but after that, since they were about as widely known as "liberators" among the Czechs as the fact that "water is wet", the border guards gladly let them through and rang their superiors to let them know that help, in the form of well over 3000 tanks and almost 80,000 front-line troops with 20,000 support troops, was coming.

What ensued was two months of the units popping up once in a while in Austria and other times in the Czech Republic (and other times taking time off to rest) kicking Soviet butt and collecting scrap metal. The British and French were massing behind the German lines on the Oder for a massed offensive while Stalin was getting angrier and angrier over the clear superiority of the Red Maple Leaf over the Red Star in tank-to-tank warfare. Hence he ordered his scientists to work harder on a better 105mm round and to make a thicker-armoured version of the T-55. It would take some time to arrive, but fortunately the Allies didn't have the manpower to exploit that weakness to the fullest extent, namely the grinding battle across the Balkans in winter was still going somewhat in the Soviets' favour. Stalin had severely underestimated the Allies' fighting capacity. He had expected the "bourgeois capitalists" to be fragile and breakable with their economic depression.

He was wrong, they were, if anything, even more tenacious, and one bourgeois capitalist in particular was severely hampering the Soviet efforts. Hannah Shepard's factories had begun full-time war production upon the start of the war, and tens of thousands of tons of supplies, produced during the not-so-peaceful peacetime since 1948, were mobilized and distributed en masse to the soldiers and reservists of the Balkans within a couple weeks of the war starting, Yugoslavia and Albania excluded. Albania had been contained as it was Communist, but had yet to join the war on the Soviet side, so the Allies weren't paying it as much attention as they probably should have. It also capitulated to the Allied side immediately after the war began, so it was not occupied by Allied troops. Despite that seemingly being in the Allies' favour (more troops to the front line) Stalin was still pressing hard southward, and launched repeated attempts to pass the Soviet submarine fleet through the straits near Istanbul. These were stopped solid by Allied warships forced to wait at the mouth of the Sea of Marmara as it was Turkish territorial waters, and Turkey was still technically neutral. The Soviet troops discreetly moved to Syria to tie up the SI forces stationed in Palestine were being pulverized regiment by regiment under the treads of tanks stationed in Palestine stampeding northward, which meant the Middle East theatre was still quite favourable.

Of course, they did have an excuse in that the Soviets attacked Palestine first. Apparently Stalin hadn't quite understood the real usefulness of MCVs as his troop movements were hideously obvious and the Palestine garrison (and Palestinian Self-Defence Force) had lots of time to prepare. On the other hand, if he'd used MCVs PROPERLY then he could have done some real damage instead of make a big Red Maple Leaf With Bars flag fly over Damascus. The Palestinian Self-Defence Force currently had three twenty-thousand-man Divisions, all Mechanized Infantry and equipped with used but well-maintained Raider IIDs and APCs sold to the Palestinian government at factory price. In less glorified terms, they were much better off than the British and French armies would be when it came time for a showdown with Soviet armour. Sure, Hannah might not have pushed the issue of a co-ed military, but that was something that could wait, her reforms were already enough for the decade to handle, and more changes would come after this new war, such as giving women the vote.

The Soviets didn't seem to be trying very hard in the war though… so Hannah hoped to get a peaceful resolution fairly soon. What she failed to realize was Stalin's gross underestimation of the Allies' military strength and the hideous underdevelopment of Soviet tank armour quality thanks to the inevitable failure of Communism in scientific progress. Okay, so it was mainly as without a real war the leader was too suspicious of smart people like scientists, but still there was the problem of the intellectual purges of Stalin slowing his lot down badly. On the American and European side was the technical non-knowhow of the top military staff and the wastage that was all too natural in a nationalised setting. They could afford to waste time and money whereas SI could not and did not tolerate wastage of time and money because they weren't a country, they were a business, and that meant they meant business.

Of course, Soviet scientific ineptitude was why the MiG-15s were only matching evenly against their current Sabre jets, but Hannah, Jane, and the aviators sincerely hoped the Arrow (as it was still called in lieu of a serial numbered name) could be brought in soon to make the air match as bad as the ground one. There was also research on a high-powered utility helicopter able to handle assault roles, but that was in its preliminary stages. However, construction efforts on a viable, powerful surface-to-air missile system effective against close or mid-level air support—since high-altitude bombing was not effective against a mobile army—was in its final stages and would be tested through the winter for cold-weather performance in the Northwest Territories. The weapon was expected to enter service in early 1957 and would present an alternative fitting for S-WM-15 mounts on warships and vehicles (where applicable). It could give an MCV some serious AA kill power… and, with adaptations for APC turret mounts (S-WM-20s), give an APC lots of AA kill power too. The thing was that Jane demanded the missiles also had to be able to target lightly armoured ground targets, which had meant more time and effort was required to make a satisfactory weapon, but once made it could do more damage.

Thus far the war was alright, tough but quite survivable for the Allies… That did not last long.

* * *

><p>AN: Yes, it is, unfortunately, very true that the Mammoth Tank was not exactly a Soviet-original idea. Hitler started it with the Mouse tank (Panzer 8), SI introduced the basic scheme of four tracks plus really heavy armour (though they didn't go THAT over-the-top and used spaced armour to defend against HEAT shells), and all hell will break loose when it finally comes to the battlefield, just like all hell broke loose with the T-1955 but with roles somewhat reversed.

REVIEW!


	2. Miasmic Overtures

A/N: If anyone's going to complain about the battlefield firepower the T-1955 brings to bear, please keep in mind that I need a real, practical reason for the Soviets to develop the Mammoth Tank. The USSR was dependent on German scientists captured in WWII to get most of its tech in our timeline, because Stalin's paranoia made intellectuals almost extirpated from the country, so they need somewhere to get ideas from… though they may go totally overboard with the Mammoth, much as SI went over-the-top with the T-1955.

I am sorry, **Dark Darius**, about the "bricks of information", but I don't think people will quite get the technical aspects too clearly if I spread it out. I probably pitched to my own tastes—"a tech manual should be of moderate length, detail, and analysis of field performance, focusing more on the last part if it's a user's manual instead of a purchase brochure"—a bit too much. Best regards to you too. (By the way, long length tech manuals would take up most of a chapter, or be chapter-length, note that moderate ones for me are about 2000 words, is that too much?)

**Lost guy on lost planet**, I know what C&C canon goes like, but to put ALL the C&C games together requires quite some work… and changes to the canon are unavoidable, such as keeping our WWII with a big mod, making RA1 into WWIII, RA2 into WWIV, RA3 into WWV (VI if you count the Psychic Dominator Disaster, which technically was a global-scale war). Oh, and I'm getting rid of **part **of the Allies' need for plot armour, seriously, would they be able to do jack shit without plot armour or totally absurd inventions? NO. Oh, and Einstein will not be the only person seen inventing things.

* * *

><p>Chapter 2: Miasmic Overtures<p>

_May 1957_

Twelfth Division had finally arrived in-theatre, and Sixth Division had been replaced in Palestine by Third Division back in February, bringing the total in-theatre SI forces up to seven divisions by the end of April. The British and French were attacking into Poland these days, and the Balkans were still holding, if barely, and the initial Soviet wave seemed to be losing steam. However, all that changed on April 12, 1957 when a massive Soviet horde poured over the defences in the Czech Republic and overwhelmed them, forcing the three SI Field Divisions present to retreat after suffering upward of 10% casualties and running low on ammunition. In return for the 7000-some SI casualties and the occupation of the Czech Republic, well over that many Soviet vehicles had been destroyed in the fighting retreat and even more infantry had been mown down. Several mass raids on Germany ensued, and something very bad had happened…

"When was the last report?" Von Esling asked Stavros tersely.

"0800 hours, after that, nothing." Von Esling nodded to himself once at the Greek's reply, that meant the Allied scouts had been found and destroyed, sadly.

"Do we have air superiority?" Gunter facepalmed "Right, why am I asking, it can be secured easily enough. Nikos, I'd like to introduce you to the woman who leads the crew who's about to solve our problem for us."

"I've already met Shepard, thank you."

"I don't think my last name is Shepard, though I do work for my cousin." A feminine voice stated from the doorway moments before Tanya Adams slinked into the room in her usual combat attire of figure-hugging body armour. Of course, the only reason that still worked out perfectly at thirty years of age (Archivists' Note: Remember, this is before most of those beauty care products, so 30 should begin to sag a bit) was due to her genetic blessings making her still look about eighteen or twenty "Hannah said I was supposed to show up here about now, is that right?"

"I requested her personally." Gunter stated before Stavros could make a comment at the blonde. "She'll get the job done." She smirked and nodded when he looked back to her "We need to get Einstein back, Tanya, he's our top scientist, by reputation if nothing else, and who knows what the Soviets could do with him in their hands?" Gunter showed her a series of photos "He's imprisoned in this research complex on the Slovakian-Hungarian border, awaiting transfer to the USSR, we can't let that happen. They have Tesla Coil defences guarding the perimeter, powerful enough to melt a tank's hull within a few good shots, or vaporize a human being in a single strike."

"Their weakness is power, and their power plants are not exactly well-guarded according to these photographs. If you can take out even one power plant and get Einstein out before they can construct a new one from this ConYard over here, we have every confidence that they will be unable to bring the Tesla Coils online under low power conditions." Stavros stated, pointing at a simple but functional map of the compound, which seemed to have been rather uptight about budgeting and requisitioning more parts from command.

"What about our exit strategy?"

"As soon as you get Einstein out, your attached forces will be able to destroy at relatively long range some of the power plants in this unguarded area of the compound," Gunter tapped part of the map the scouts had sent back previously "thereby destroying more of their power supply and sowing confusion, distracting the Soviets while you extract Einstein to the evacuation point here. Your support will be a whole armoured battalion Hannah's agreed to assign to you for this mission. Feel free to use them however you want, but be warned that the six guns in a battalion's artillery battery cannot produce the rain of shells that you might want for support."

"Alright… let's get this show on the road then."

"Very well, Tanya, good luck."

Tanya paused in her exit and looked over her shoulder while standing in the doorway she had entered through "Oh, and Stavros, I'm quite sure the Soviets HAVE learned to remove buildings from the power grid, we'll have to blow up all but one power plant if we want to ensure we have enough time. It would be simpler just to kill the Coils to start off."

"Do what you believe is best and get the job done, Tanya, I can't ask you for more than that." Von Esling stated simply.

"Got it, Gunter."

* * *

><p><em>Slovakian-Hungarian border, May 17, 1957<em>

It was… _embarrassingly_ easy to disguise a T-1955 as a T-55, since the main gun was already offset to one side, and the secondary gun could have a mock-up put over it to make it look like another main gun. The track pods were locked together instead of being allowed to articulate independently (the drivers grumbled about the rough ride) and the gaps on either side were patched over to look like one track skirt plate. The difference between 105 and 110mm was small enough that few noticed the different diameter of the gun, and they'd pulled the main gun back using the recoil mechanism to its maximum, to make the barrel not seem significantly longer than the 105mm shorter-barrel (calibres-wise and therefore length-wise) gun of the T-55. The APCs were disguised as old T-50s not yet upgraded to T-55 standard, as they were, once appliqué armour had been slapped on over a stand-off space, approximately the right size, a bit lighter, and could fit a mock-up turret over the real one to look like one of the few T-50s still in service. Sure, they only had 40mm guns, but these mock-ups had two panels that could be dropped on command to expose the anti-tank rocket racks on the sides of the APC's turret, giving it significant anti-armour firepower.

The disguises had already been assembled by the time Tanya arrived at the Czech-Polish border via chopper, apparently her cousin had been briefed and ordered this battalion to don the disguises assembled over the past few months. They had been intended for sneaking around behind Soviet lines, and this was a good time to use them for the first time. From what captured Soviet conscripts said, Red Army troops, even officers, were supposed to just mind their own business and blindly follow orders from higher up. This was quite contrary to SI units chattering with one another as long as they were close enough and radio silence was not demanded. Even if radio silence was desired, as long as combat was not expected, troops from different units would often park side-by-side and chatter by passing, of all things, a phone wire between the external plugs on their vehicles. Coupled with the very low casualty rate and even lower death rate of the troops, plus informality among the ranks outside combat as per training demanded of the officers, this produced a "shameful" degree of unit cohesion. At least, several other-faction Allied generals who had observed their combat efficiency had stated that it shamed their own militaries.

The lack of social interaction in the Red Army would be what made this blatant intrusion possible, since the Soviets would hopefully assume someone higher up had ordered this column to turn back for some purpose and leave them to move by. After weeding out a Soviet spy from Sixth Armoured Brigade to make sure no one said anything about a whole battalion going missing, Tanya and her spec ops squadron led them through the Sudeten Mountains, a total of about a thousand men and women rolling through Soviet turf and past Soviet campsites without difficulty. Most of the men were, in the few times they had breaks and could hook up wired communications between their vehicles, quite astonished by the lack of Soviet questioning, but since the units they passed were only Red Army it was perfectly plausible.

For obvious reasons, no one complained, so now here they were waiting behind several hills (to stay out of the line of sight of the Tesla Coils just in case the Soviets had people or cameras standing on the towers) for Tanya's main squad to give the signal.

* * *

><p>"Who the hell leaves a pile of barrels out for a high explosive shell to lay waste to?" Tanya wondered aloud as the first T-1955, now half-buried in snow by the crew for camouflage after it discarded its disguise, fired a five-round clip from its secondary 40mm auto-cannon into the pile of barrels sitting next to the nearest power plant. They went up in a huge explosion and tore the power plant windows to shreds moments before a 110mm HEAT shell and more 40mm HE shells went in through said broken window and blew the internal machinery of the prefab structure to hell, leaving a burnt-out husk and blacking out the rest of the base's power grid for now.<p>

Over thirty T-1955s charged in from the east end of the base blasting away at the power plants in that sector, attracting the guards' attention. Another thirty or so broke through the southern wall and hit the ConYard with everything they had to prevent the Soviets from patching something together through the base power grid, which usually had its main hub in the ConYard in Soviet centralized designs. The Soviets thought the initial strike to the northwestern-most power plant was a diversion to draw them away from the eastern attack, which was to draw them away from the southern one… boy were they wrong. The battalion totalled in at a bit over 100 tanks now that the autoloaders had been employed in T-1955s. That meant they had gone back to the same sort of arrangement they had back when Armoured Brigades were still called Light tank brigades with three crewmen per vehicle (as opposed to four which had reduced the tank count for a while during the Raider series of tanks).

Hence the Soviets were, for lack of better terms, all looking the other way when Tanya and her spec ops squad came down the road from the northwest, slogging through the snow and shooting the few guards still around the tech center, who were all looking south nervously with the closest roars of cannon fire coming from that direction. It was too easy to shoot them in the back of their heads with silenced SMGs and rifles, and then waltz in the front door of the tech center, shooting everyone in a Soviet uniform that they found as they spread out inside the medium-sized building.

This type of structure served as a reporting station on higher-powered technologies such as Tesla Coils and helped coordinate their assembly and repairs, where applicable. Hannah could not comprehend why anyone would do this, but it seemed to be to make MCVs less valuable in terms of blueprints for high-end technologies contained inside if the vehicle was captured. It also reduced the volume and mass of expensive data storage hardware… she could understand that, but why the hell would her Allies or even the Soviets need that unless… oh boy. Their assembly crates weren't very well-packaged or well-labelled were they? Then again for some of the Soviet technologies the grunts probably couldn't handle the assembly and needed some smarter people to do it, not that Stalin left many smart people alive with his repeated purges… what a dumb brute he was.

The Soviets managed to wire up ONE Tesla Coil into functioning again, and on its first strike it temporarily firepower-killed a T-1955 by virtue of hitting the primary rangefinder and gun site module. melting the system into slag and forcing the crew to revert to a more primitive system AND spray some liquid carbon dioxide fire extinguishing material on the area struck. They only realized the heat side-effect after the Commander got a burn from touching the patch of heated metal, and then the Commander got the spare, non-automatic fire extinguisher out while the gunner smothered the flame on his sleeve. Carbon dioxide fire extinguishers were not fun to use inside a tank (thank God for the good ventilation systems), but it did cool the blast area very well, and put out electrical and oily fires. The lack of an actual fire inside the tank meant the automatic system wasn't active, but the heat was a hazard. The main gun bellowed, and the gunner cursed as he missed the spire of the Tesla Coil, maybe they needed more gunnery practice with the secondary gun sights…

The next strike slagged a large patch of the forward outer armour, though the driver reported minimal heat for now from sensors on the inside of the engine compartment as the spacing and ceramic had blocked most of the heat transmission, unlike the gun-sights that had to go through the ceramic and so transmitted heat anyways. The wintry conditions outside would help cool the outside of the vehicle… hopefully. The fellow tanks, alerted by the commander of the damaged one, focused their fire on the Tesla Coil and started firing masses of HEAT shells its way.

Tesla Coils were sturdily built, but they weren't THAT sturdily built, and it got off one more shot. After it fell, the Soviets managed to rig up one more Tesla Coil for a single shot. That last shot was delivered to the same spot on the damaged tank that was backing up, looking for a snowdrift to shelter behind. It stopped dead in its tracks a moment before a blast of fire and smoke came from under the forward track pods and forward hull. The engine had cooked off and popped the hinged vents on the inside of the track pods and then the hull bottom (in the thin-armoured section) wide open, expelling most of the pressure at the same time as the fuel supply cut off and the automatic firefighting equipment engaged. Still, the tank was now formally powerless and thoroughly disabled. The worst thing was that they hadn't brought any replacement parts, which meant it would have to be taken under tow by another tank, routing electrical power to its secondary drive train and other systems (such as the turret traverse), and physically towing it too. That would make it a bitch to extract, but was understandable given four Tesla Coil hits.

In the meantime, Tanya was smuggling Einstein—who seriously needed training on how not to bumble his way through snowy terrain—out of the north end of the base with no attention whatsoever directed at her. The Soviets weren't too concerned about two tanks and an APC literally loitering around and not shooting at them, sure, they kept an eye on them, but they were so still and do-nothing-y (Archivists' Note: This was literally what the Soviet guys assigned to watch the three vehicles wrote in their logs about them, as recovered after the war) that the commander of the base was more focused on the southern and eastern ends. They also looked like mock-ups (Tanya hadn't had time to completely strip off all the vehicles' disguises before their window of opportunity for the infiltration of the area arrived) so the Soviets figured they WERE mock-ups put there after the initial shot from the north just to distract them from the real attacks.

Well, the next time to Soviets looked north, the "mock-ups" were gone. Oh, and so was Einstein who Tanya had nabbed from the centermost room of the Soviet Tech Lab. Tanya's actual crew had to trek a bit further to reach their APCs while the other tanks systematically demolished the rest of the base. No one alive was left behind, including several APC-loads of bound and gagged Soviet prisoners who had surrendered instead of letting themselves be mown down. As for the three tanks disabled in the attack, one, with only a track popped, was patched up right away. The firepower kill—namely the main gun barrel hit and wrecked by a shell—was plodding along on its own but no longer in shape to take on any heavily armoured opponents, unless the men wanted to use the rocket launcher issued as an emergency weapon to every vehicle. The other mobility kill with its engine totally slagged but the damage contained by the equatorial bulkhead of the vehicle was taken under tow and an electric cord passed over to help move it and its turret.

The troop donned disguises again to try to get past the Soviets discreetly at the maximum T-55 speed, which wasn't much. However they were seen on the Czech-Polish border and a Soviet group tried talking to them, though they managed to bluff their way by via the few who could speak Russian. It wasn't until near the German border that they were forced to fight a Soviet group. Fortunately, since they got surprise, first strike and three-to-one numerical advantage, it wasn't much of a problem overwhelming the thirty or so Soviet tanks and gunning down anyone who tried to run. Sure, it wasn't their usual "Live and let live" doctrine which reduced the enemy's willingness to fight, but Spec Ops missions couldn't afford mercy. The reason was that to quote Hannah and Jane Shepard in the Spec Ops Doctrine "Mercy is the responsibility of the victorious to the defeated, in a Spec Ops mission, you are the weak side, and letting runaways get away with valuable information about you will only prove to be your downfall. Unless you are literally over the next hill from friendly territory, capture them or kill them, NO ONE is to be left behind to leak information."

After that, things were uneventful until they made it to friendly territory and handed Einstein over to the German entourage waiting to receive the respected scientist. However, while the group was congratulating itself on a job well done and reuniting Fourth battalion of Sixth Armoured Brigade with the rest of Sixth Field Division near Zwickau, some things happened that would change the face of the allied war effort irrevocably.

* * *

><p>AN: The following may be offensive to rabid Allies fans, reader discretion is advised. Note that these Sarin-related Allied events are real and historical, though timing is a bit altered for the US test proposal (which btw Australia shot down in 1960). Also, I'm extending Eden's term in office a little to accommodate for the beginning of a new war.

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><p><em>Bonn, Germany, May 19, 1957<em>

"Are these reports accurate?" Hannah hissed at the five assembled Generals. She was met with stony silence. "ARE THESE REPORTS ACCURATE?" She snarled, pointing at the documents laid out before all of them. In a recent counterintelligence operation in Britain and the US, SI had captured documents from a Soviet spy network about Allies Sarin tests on humans. It was no doubt to get the USSR a confirmed high ground in morality and propaganda directed at the Western World, but Stalin wouldn't be the one to use that. A certain someone was too righteous to let that happen.

"As far as I can see… yes, they are entirely accurate." Stavros stated in a quiet voice.

"Please, Hannah…" Gunter began.

"Please what? Let Britain kill people with poison gas just for kicks?" She lunged for him and dragged the British general over the table by the collar and smiled at him "Not even Hitler used gas on Allied soldiers in World War Two, so unless you are running concentration camps, you should be better than him, shouldn't you?" She was referring to the 1953 test of Sarin on humans at the Porton Down chemical warfare testing facility in Wiltshire, where several Royal Air Force personnel were killed after being told they were in a test "to cure the common cold". "And you, Carville, what have you got to say about this?" She waved another paper in his face. "Oh, and you better have something to say, just like Mr. What's-His-Name here."

The Briton started to say something "It's…" He mumbled something unintelligible as Hannah's glare dared him to actually claim he had a name worthy of saying in this conference room. She smirked at his silence and hurled him back into his seat with a hard shove that made said seat fall over hard and the man clamour up without speaking.

The American general sighed deeply, his eyes downcast in shame. His country's military was powerful, but there were so many isolationists tired of fighting "another European war" that though they were mobilized they were officially not yet at war, so the most potent, concentrated strike force in-theatre remained Shepard's seven divisions. He didn't like the evidence put before him, but his main priority was still keeping Hannah on his side "I didn't know of this, and I'm hoping Mr. President doesn't know either… I don't know what I would do if it turns out he was behind this whole business."

The United States had been looking for Australian permission to test Sarin and VX gas on two or three hundred "mainly Australian" troops in Australia, probably in the Iron Range rainforest near Lockhart River, Queensland. The planning was already in advanced stages as to gas delivery methods and protection given to the troops—namely nothing other than regular combat gear—and how much gas would be employed. The tests were planned for 1960, three years from now, but had been moved forward to 1958 in case Sarin needed to be used against the Soviets. It reminded Hannah all too much of the reports of the Soviets using Sarin on entire unsuspecting villages in Poland just for fun and results. "I know you didn't know, Carville, and I'm not blaming you, but did you know that the Soviets gassed whole villages in Poland for fun and results, to see how the gas performs depending on the season and weather? My troops are fuelled by rage and hatred of the Soviet leaders, and the news has already gone out around the world. That's a problem…"

Everyone gaped for a moment but Gunter shot upright first, leaning forward across the conference table "HANNAH WHAT DID YOU DO—"

"Gunter von Esling," she wasn't loud, but she said it forcefully enough the Supreme European Allied Commander sat down immediately like a petulant child "if you want to purchase any T-1955s in the future, and you'll be the only client I'm willing to sell to within the next six or so years, I recommend you shut up and let me finish. As I said, the world news has already begun its coverage of the miasmic" Carville snorted at the pun, making her glance at him in annoyance before continuing "nature of everyone's sins, so you'd better tidy up your act, guys, because the world's eyes are on you. Oh, and I wouldn't be surprised if my troops insist on stepping down from front-line duty and going into a strategic reserve after this. I won't be able to help too much in offensive operations for the next couple of weeks as a token of protest…"

"No…" Everyone said at once.

"As long as the Allies continue to gas innocents, I am afraid that morality may not allow many of my men and women to agree with continuing to fight alongside you. Of course, we are still willing to fork over our used tanks as new ones arrive, and run supplies across the Atlantic, in addition to selling you ships and the like, but Sarin, really? Your governments brought this whole mess upon themselves, you know, and for the record, Anthony Eden is officially screwed."

"Well Hallelujah." The Briton stated, hoping to get on her good side if at all possible.

"Anyhow, we'll still be on the Allied side, but we will not conduct major offensive operations into pre-war Soviet-controlled territory until this whole gas debacle is resolved." Hannah stated simply "If you need us somewhere to defend it, just say so, I'm sorry, generals, but that's the way it is, the world is black, dark grey, light grey, and white, I think your governments wandered into the black on this one, and I am sure you honourable men will not be able to tolerate it either if you didn't have to."

* * *

><p><em>LondonWashington, May 19-21, 1957_

Hannah hated Anthony Eden… oh how she HATED Anthony Eden. It had been fairly obvious at the beginning of the Hungarian debacle that appeasement would soon lead to Stalin starting another World War, but did the son of a bitch listen to her warning and wait for her to negotiate something with Nasser? NO! He went and invaded Egypt, which made intervention in Hungary very difficult as she was formally one of the Allies, which included Britain. They could not condemn the USSR for Hungary when they were doing the same in Egypt, and the Soviets had gotten a good jump-off against Austria out of Eden's debacle. The lack of American support should have made the op a clear no-go as it showed Stalin the West was divided and weak, encouraging his ambition to the degree of beginning World War Three. The threat of Nasser's ambition was small potatoes compared to Stalin's, and she alone could have beaten the shit out of all of Egypt. Even better, she could have done it after negotiations broke down, so there was at least an effort to negotiate things first.

Since he repeatedly refused to listen to good advice, she decided it was time to give him a little punishment, and had activated one of her Support cells in London some days ago upon receiving the damning evidence for Allied Sarin experimentation. These were different form Spec/Black Ops cells in that they had no weapons, not even stashed at the Canadian embassy—which all Spec/Black Ops cells had, stashed at embassy or not—but were purely civilian in nature, sympathetic to her cause and paid through their place of employment, usually through a business she was invested in. They would be ready when the news came out…

The evidence had come from counterintelligence, part of an operation which began in Canada and tracked the Soviet spies to America and Britain. Her Black Ops squads involved with the case had actually had clashes with British and American intelligence services over the evidence, many of her good men and women had died at the hands of the CIA, MI5 and MI6 to secure the evidence. That resulted in boiling hatred for the intelligence agencies on Hannah's behalf, hatred she put to good use as she was doing now, her Support cell entering the streets from their homes with picket signs and helping stir the angry people already in the streets up by handing out gas masks and the like to them. Sure, Sarin could penetrate skin easily, but they didn't need to know that, merely that they needed to stop their governments from doing very, very wrong things. Pretty soon others also began to fashion picket signs and grab old World War Two issue gas masks, adults and children alike marching through the streets of London. Eden was about to fall, and fall hard…

Eden deserved it, siccing his intelligence agencies on her Black Ops teams which only helped his guys get rid of Soviet spies, turning on her as soon as that little job was done. She would show him what it meant to betray her like that, though the dozens of dead MI5 agents already made a bit of a point, she made a larger one with this morning's news broadcasts. The best thing was that at the end of the broadcasts, MI5 had actually intervened. Since SI Embassy personnel were lounging around the transmitters of the BBC stations, with their guards, on an ostensible tour of the facilities, MI5 had literally had to break into the studios instead of taking out the towers, to try to stay friendly at least on the surface with her. They had discharged firearms in the process, and pulled a "By the order of the Security Service, this broadcast is terminated". Yeah, that went over REAL well… dumbasses…

So now the mobs of London, snowballing rapidly in a mixture of fear and hatred, were rallied outside Parliament and several other government facilities including 10 Downing Street. Their chant was led by the Support cell members, running "This we swear, this we swear, that you shall never gas us and live!" In Washington, the same thing was happening outside the Pentagon's enclosure.

Anthony Eden resigned the very next morning, and Parliament declared that Britain would never manufacture, purchase, or use Sarin under any circumstances in the future, under a law, but everyone knew that laws were at best farces. Still, the temporarily appeased grumbling mobs went home, though according to the papers the next day "the SI embassy kindly sent out people to hand out brochures about Sarin survival from door to door".

In America, things were quite different. The protestors camped outside the Pentagon and CIA Headquarters overnight, and Eisenhower had to find out THROUGH The NEWSPAPERS on May 20, 1957 about the peaceful protest as said intelligence agency tried to deal with it on their own. He sent negotiators to talk with the crowds, while the isolationists crowed about "looking within ourselves before pointing fingers at Soviet Russia". It was all part of Hannah Shepard's plan, since the Americans would be busied enough by internal affairs that she would be responsible for halting the Soviet offensive stage and turning the tide in Europe. This way, she would gain far greater influence in Europe and even in America as the honest paragon that she in reality was most certainly not. She just wanted to delay the American involvement for a bit, maybe a year?

Sadly, the protests would go from bad to worse, until finally it came to a showdown that resulted in America very nearly staying out of the war completely…

* * *

><p><em>Europe, June 1957<em>

Hannah had just finished laughing her ass off at a new contract Jane approved— clearing out the protestors around the Pentagon and CIA Headquarters areas before the end of June 18th—when she got horrible, horrible news. Neutral Finland had been invaded by Stalin, who was making no headway in other fronts, and Sweden was being retarded about neutrality, so she could only really move her forces to Norway to be ready to help if needed. However, there was the threat of subs based in Murmansk… and the lack of really friendly relations between SI and Norway. Finland was a big NO for a battleground, as the USSR controlled the Baltic and the country was falling too fast for a convoy to bludgeon its way through to drop off enough troops to stop the Soviet advance there. Regardless, things were looking… pretty ugly in the Scandinavian Front. The Balkans had recently fallen and Greece was being hard-pressed.

Well, that was life, it pretty much sucked balls. Anyhow, her forces had once again been committed to the front lines after a token protest of about a week over the allied testing of Sarin gas on innocents. You'd think that with so many people condemned to death for crimes each year they could run toxicology tests on those who deserved it, the way SI did (hey, SOMEONE had to check the lethal dosages of the sleeping agents SI used for chemical warfare…) but NOOOOOOOO they couldn't have done it in a more publically acceptable fashion. At least Hannah made the reports clear to the public and made broadcasts about how it was so much nicer than the electric chair, hanging or being shot, you just fall asleep and… that's it, like dying naturally. It was closer to euthanasia than an execution, and it got the toxicology reports she wanted before approving any chemical agent for use in the field. The best thing about using only sleeping agents was that when the surgeons ran out of morphine in the field—though this was rare—it wasn't much of a problem, as the labels were pretty clear about the safe dosage range of any gas the troops were issued (only gross overdoses were dangerous, otherwise the gas was not issued).

* * *

><p>AN: I know the CIA is a lot of things, but it's not stupid… so why is it portrayed as retarded, obstinate, asinine, evil, or any combination of the above all the time in movies? Well, here's a possible explanation, someone was VERY bad at wording orders…

I know they would never do something so stupid in real life, but orders from Congress are orders from Congress, not like they can do anything about it. And it's not like the US didn't have a history of suppressing riots, like Chicago.

* * *

><p><em>Washington DC, June 17, 1957<em>

It had been and still was a difficult job convincing the mobs to go home. The troops were trying to persuade the peaceful crowds—who even allowed police to search their tents—to go and stay home instead of being here and getting sprayed regularly by tear gas by the police. In the end, it came down to bringing the mobs down from the inside via several human rights activists who were part of the multiple Support Cells in Washington. After several speeches from these activists and finally a pledge from Jane to make Congress agree with their demands of ceasing all poison gas testing on civilians or Allied personnel, the crowds agreed to back down by 100 meters from their original envelopment, which only had the roads leading out of the CIA Headquarters and Pentagon clear of the mobs. However, on June 16, Congress shot Jane Shepard's proposal down on national television real-time live broadcast, and the mobs, after shouting and manning the picket lines for two hours without results, seemed to gain a life of its own. They went completely out of control, even with Jane, the activists, and her troops trying to maintain order and keep the agitated mobs calm.

The massive crowds departed the premises… and returned the very next day with crude body armour fashioned from ceramic (mostly bathroom tiles, though some pauldrons were fashioned from bowls and plates), basket weave, and athletic protection gear. It seemed that the Unrest Survival Guide distributed to the citizens of Washington to help reduce casualties from riot-related violence was being used in a way that Jane ostensibly had not foreseen… They blocked the roads to the Capitol building, the CIA Headquarters, and the Pentagon, pushing against the riot police lines and shouting slogans against poison gas through everything from handheld megaphones to sub-woofers. The reading of the Riot Act went ignored, until the SI soldiers trying to hold the mob back stopped trying at the newest surveillance reports, gazing northward in abject horror at what they were seeing. Tanks, dozens of tanks, all M48s, were rolling down the streets from Union Station in the north, more were reported closing in from the east and south.

Jane was a lot of things, but stupid she was not, so she resorted to the most obvious choice for silence: firing a blank shell into the air from a T-1955's 110mm barrel. The boom echoed around the square from the tank parked just west of the US Supreme Court, and everyone quieted immediately, even the riot police. "EVERYBODY LOOK NORTH!" Jane shouted over the big speakers she'd set up around the area, using APCs as the islands on which the speakers were mounted and powered from, and wiring her radio signal through them. "If you don't go home right now, I am going to tell you that there is no way in hell that I am going to get into a tank battle with the US Army or whoever is driving those US-made M48 Patton tanks in the middle of Washington DC. If you do not wish to be squashed by them, I recommend you leave in orderly, quiet fashion, I cannot guarantee your safety if you do not comply with these instructions." The crowd buzzed for a bit before reluctantly going home, realism and survival instincts trumping a desire to force their government to comply.

The Pentagon area crowd was similarly dispelled, but since CIA-SI relations weren't exactly as friendly as US-SI relations, there had been no tanks stationed there, only some soldiers. It is to be noted that a 100-ton Main Battle Tank along with a few infantrymen made a very looming, imposing presence that kept thefts among the mob to a minimum and basically forbade looting. Often this looting management was accomplished simply by pointing the turret at the would-be looters, angling the flamethrower (where available) up, and giving off a small puff of fire to make a point. In the CIA Headquarters area, a lot more young people, students, were rallied, and they used their primitive body armour to push their way forcibly through the CIA security line. The chattering of machine-guns and the screams of dying people filled the immediate vicinity moments later as the M48s and M41s (the US light tanks) parked in the underground garage were brought out to break the mob into submission. The grinding of tracks, crunching and snapping of bones as they were run over, and the death wails of people filled the streets before the horrified eyes of the riot police who had earlier been overwhelmed and the SI troops who had also tried to keep order in the crowd.

It was time to bring out the big guns, as the riot police, after a moment's hesitation, rushed to their vehicles and brought out the newest Bazooka model which had been issued to them. Incidentally, one such Bazooka crew took cover behind a wrecked, burnt-out pickup truck where an SI soldier with a rocket launcher was also hiding. Screaming people fled past them, some tripping and being stampeded to death under the feet of many others. "You up for teaching those damned spies a lesson?" The SI soldier asked, his pistol levelled at the two riot cops, who had their hands up.

"Yeah, motherfuckers… my son's in this riot somewhere, and I ain't about to let them grind over him." One of the riot cops replied, before a tank rolled by their cover, leaving a red, bloody set of track prints. The guy in a tux on the topside gun yelled something to them before the riot cop shot him five times with his pistol and threw a tear gas grenade down the cupola, the tank grounding to a halt moments later. "Light him up." He told his buddy, ignoring the SI soldier near the other end of the pickup, who had popped up to fire a rocket at an oncoming M41, blowing it up in a catastrophic kill with a single shot. The whoosh of the Bazooka was drowned out by the explosion of the M41 light tank that had been following the M48.

The first round didn't do the job, so the two men were still frantically reloading while the SI soldier spoke up, having reloaded his own rocket launcher with years of skill and practice "Allow me." His rocket did the trick, and the three men shared a round of handshakes and nods before moving out past the burning wreckage of the tank.

The T-1955s arrived on the scene from the main area around the Capitol in time to witness a bitter urban warfare scenario raging through the streets as the furious mob, armed with Molotov Cocktails and assorted small-arms now, engaged the CIA guards. The kill to loss ratio for the civilian/riot cop/SI side was astoundingly low, even with the riot cops and SI troops assisting wherever they could. Hostile snipers were firing from the windows of the nearby buildings, a problem not remedied until the buildings, or at least windows, were torched by the flamethrowers some of the T-1955s were mounting. They had smashed any and all tanks and vehicles painted with CIA colours and logo, with blessings from Eisenhower and Congress.

The orders that had been sent out by Congress were "only if absolutely needed, to intimidate the rioters into leaving, consider **firing for effect**." Unfortunately, Congressmen had worded it and before Eisenhower could change it to "make a lot of noise but do NOT fire for effect" the CIA HQ battle had already started. Congressmen were notoriously inept militarily, and most had no military experience, even though they were in the Capitol right at that time, so the end result was Jane sending a message to them by radio "Do you even know what fire for effect means?" It had been in quite a biting tone, but as usual the shameless Congressmen ignored that sarcasm.

"No." They had replied. To Jane, it sounded extremely cheeky…

"It means fire that is effective in damaging or destroying a target." Jane wondered for a moment if the US tank crews, their guns now all pointed toward the Capitol building, would turn a blind eye if she gave Congress a piece of her mind i.e. blew them and their conference room up. She decided it wasn't worth the effort even though Eisenhower had told her via Executive Order to destroy the CIA or other hostile forces attacking US civilians. They had only been following the order of Congress after all.

The attack on civilians meant every single living thing in the CIA HQ was exterminated and a bitter battle fought through the subway tunnels and sewers that served as a back door to the building. Sure, the CIA personnel were well-trained, but so were SI Spec/Black Ops. With numbers, equipment, and surprise, it didn't take too long to completely clear the area, especially as they'd piped gas into the tunnels mere moments after it became apparent the Spec Ops units couldn't sustain the casualty rate required to deal with their now-foes.

Most of those captured were then conscripted into the regular US army as punishment, however, all of them died from mysterious accidents or combat over the next few years, "accidents" which would all be traced back to the rebuilt CIA. Of course, these were "accidents" both Hannah and Jane knew of, but which neither did anything about since these Black Ops centered around silencing intelligence leaks were just a normal part of business and any intel agency. If you got into a country's intel services, you would die in there. It wasn't like how her Black Ops cells worked, since they knew so little about other cells (usually nothing at all) that when they retired they actually did retire, they were also large enough (typically about 15-20 people) that they didn't need to coordinate with other cells for operations. The only ones who knew everything about the cells were the Shepard sisters, which meant that signing up for Spec Ops or Black Ops was actually not really as hazardous as many other similarly well-paying jobs. They were hoping that giving the work a reasonably good rep would attract more good recruits… time would tell if they would be right.

* * *

><p>Archivists' Note: in later years, it was proven they were, since significantly more people according to popular survey aspired to becoming part of a Spec Ops squad than becoming a spy of any kind, not that SI used spies per se…*ahem* Informants and information dealers aplenty, but never spies, they were too "upstanding and honourable" for that. Yes, we do have express permission from them to be sarcastic about our great leaders.<p>

* * *

><p>The situation overall in Washington by the pay-up date of the contract job was very satisfactory. They had managed to make the rioters leave without intentionally killing any more US citizens by SI weaponry. Surgical scalpels were considered tools, not weapons, and so those who expired during surgery in the field hospitals set up in random buildings in the city did not count… and those weren't intentional killings anyhow. So basically Jane got paid what the contract specified for the basic job, in addition to compensation for SI casualties, ammunition expenditure, and material damages to SI hardware. The CIA was demonized as they couldn't clamp down on National Television quickly enough, but Congress also took a hit. Jane liked the demonizing of the CIA after the debacles during earlier operations to acquire the Allied Sarin test intel, but not Congress, as she would like to have their support…<p>

Actually, maybe inept support was worse than no support… Well, they would need the US _eventually_ to completely destroy the USSR, otherwise the war would be up for grabs for quite some time. Jane was just as determined as her sister was that the Allies would be the ones to snatch victory from this war. Still, anti-war elements in the US were using this mess as a reason why the US and Allies had no right to condemn the Soviet Union and that they should look inward before going off to blindly fight another European war so as to cover up the eyes of the public at home. They didn't need any encouraging, but Jane and Hannah were both a bit worried that they might have gone a bit overboard…

Like any decent person (a group excluding most higher-level politicians by definition) Jane and Hannah were ashamed of not stationing tanks near the CIA headquarters, and for not keeping the mob back with a fence of APCs if need be. However, what was done was done… they could only do better next time. If they needed a good excuse to destroy the CIA headquarters, then they should have had tanks on-site to take out the hostile armour as soon as it appeared instead of let it run all over the civilians. They had wanted the excuse, but not for the price to be paid in the blood of innocents.

However, at least the US government had a legitimate excuse, sort of, in the confusing orders they gave… or the bad wording thereof… however, it still led to a hideously popular phenomenon of the CIA being demonized in films for all time. The CIA could only grumble about how they were portrayed in movies, for as long as the organization was remembered, as [occasionally] inept, [always] obstinate, [often] stupid, [most certainly] evil, and [just] plain ugly on the inside.

Regrettably, this also led to the US later having a hard time condemning the June 4, 1989 incidents in China. However, that is for another day… well, a whole other decade technically, but whatever… At least the Washington incidents still kept SI's reputation of defending innocents and dispensing justice where due.

* * *

><p><em>Europe, July 1957<em>

However, the crowning event of 1957 and the whole Gas Debacle as it was called came on July 4, 1957, when the Soviet Army, having amassed resources near the Czech border, sent a giant army over the border after months of skirmishing had reduced the border defences. The defences were overwhelmed, and the Soviets surrounded Dresden, fortunately not enveloping any Allied troops as they made a hasty retreat.

SI's troops reacted at once when Dresden was surrounded, surging south from the North German Plain north of Berlin where they had been for the past month, campaigning to hold the flank of the Allied assault into Poland against Soviet troops pouring in through the area at the mouth of the Oder. The Soviets had held the line against the Allies' and even SI's attempts to secure their flanks in the north of Poland by massive deployments of Tesla Coils. The battle there was reduced to a stalemate, since constant shelling was useless—the Soviets would just rebuild—and throwing away limited resources against such a fortress didn't make sense. No, it would be far better to spear east and cut off the Soviets on the Baltic coast, then destroy them in Scandinavia, and starve that pocket out. As for the Balkans, they had evacuated everyone willing to leave, willing to live, so Hannah had no regrets telling Gunter that it would only resolve a lot of issues later on if they allowed the Soviets to hold that for now. Namely it was an observation based off of talking to Stavros about the incessant disputes among the Balkans peoples over this or that object, person, belief, or something. She had concluded that the basic problem was the same as it was everywhere else where people fought: living space. Hence, if one could not make more space out of nowhere, and one couldn't, then there had to be less people living on the available space to reduce conflicts between groups.

She knew full well that it was cold, but those crazy enough to think that living under Stalin's boot was better than leaving needed to be weeded out. It was Darwinism, basically, whoever was more sensible would produce the next generation, thus ideally generating a net increase in sensibility. Hannah and Jane both did things sensibly, so to make life easier for themselves, they needed others to be more sensible too. Wrangling things to be their way was so much more annoying with unreasonable people… such as those willing to stay in the Balkans during the Soviet occupation despite the horror stories of the front lines in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and of course the countries aligned with the Soviets before the war. Neither of the siblings had anything against the people of the Balkans, it was more of a thing against ANYONE who made colossal and obvious mistakes.

As long as Greece was retained in Allied hands, they had a jump-off from which they could one day plough north, and the mountains made Tesla Coils rather crappy weapons too. That was unlike the North German Plain where Tesla Coils could be brought to bear in such massed numbers that even slapping appliqué armour onto the T-1955s still resulted in the later-rank vehicles towing the disabled or destroyed hulks of the first ranks backward toward friendly lines so as to not leak too many ideas to the Soviets regarding tank technology. It seemed the Soviets still liked HEAT shells better for tanks… good, that meant the spaced armour and slats were even more effective than they would otherwise be. On the other hand, if they switched to sabots, she didn't think she could get armour quality up to match high-calibre cannon penetrative capabilities quickly enough. Ceramic composites were beginning to reach a sort of plateau in the balance between cost and effectiveness, a plateau far greater in cost than everyone else's but thus higher in effectiveness. However, the problem was that it was still a plateau and until better materials came about she could only make do with thicker armour, which had been why the T-1955 was rather obese, even in terms of track width (to spread the weight out).

Reports soon came in from the combat perimeter and air scouts—the Allies had forced air superiority with a massive fighter sweep—that something was happening around Dresden, the downwind Soviet units clearing out of the way while supplies were moved to the upwind units. Hannah had a bad feeling about this, a very bad feeling, and ordered her troops to prepare for anything including nuclear, biological or chemical warfare, putting on gas masks, sealing up their uniforms as best as possible. They rode buttoned up, with firing ports and truck plates sealed and air filters running in the ventilation systems just in case, as they launched a massive forced attack from the east, downwind of Dresden. The Soviets were expecting a frontal attack from the west, so they were rather surprised when thousands of T-1955s swarmed in from the right side of their encirclement. Still, they were hoping that they would manage not only to get the city, but also their worst enemies, with this single attack.

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><p>AN: I don't know what the Westwood guys were thinking, there is no way to get cruiser support to the Slovakian-Hungarian border as it is LANDLOCKED… and they have yet to invent walking warships (and no I will not have Assault Destroyers as the tech is not seen again, something which is unexplainable, and the ship's weaponry is laughably weak given its armour and the effort needed to put it on legs).

I am not racist, merely stone-cold analytical, able to bash everybody to one degree or another. You should see me when I start bashing China during the War on Terror… and the tactics SI used in that War and the PDD. You've surely also noticed the Archivists tend to be a bit sarcastic about things.

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	3. Dresden Will Be Remembered

A/N: It is perfectly possible for mountains to still be snow-clad in May, I have seen snow on flat ground in May, and I'm further south than the Sudeten Mountains are! In other words, I made a mistake and am covering it up with this excuse… well, the map was annoying in the game. There aren't any lakes big enough for cruisers in the area… not even if the Allies tried putting down a naval yard, as the area was fully landlocked and there was a reason why they had to sneak Einstein out by land and then air…

Nenfaer was right, and remember guys, STALIN IS UTTERLY INSANE! Kane didn't like the idea of what he's doing next, but he didn't find out in time to manipulate the Soviet dictator fully to his tastes, as Nadia formulated the plan in the first place. Yes, I too smell a catfight coming between the two blondes, Nadia and Tanya.

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><p>Chapter 3: Dresden Will Be Remembered<p>

Archivists' Note: Please realize that the United States of America, contrary to CNN, does have a history of violently suppressing protests. However, it is commonly agreed that the "June 17 Incidents" were caused by a miscommunication between Congress and everyone else, even the President. As for the apparent stupidity of the intelligence service known as the CIA, please remember that any intel agency will have a policy of not questioning orders no matter what they are. "Each to their station, all without exception." (Yes, to those living in the correct era, that is excerpted from the Writ of Union of the Covenant) Note that the US Army refused to fire upon the protestors, and the units involved got away with their defiance because the mistake was so embarrassing for Congress. Said Congress had thought "Fire for effect" meant "make noise and scare the crowds into going home", but in actual military jargon it means "fire that is effective in the destruction of the opponent". On the other hand, CIA Headquarters guards aren't paid to defy orders, they know perfectly well that like any other intelligence service, defying orders gets you abruptly terminated by various means. So they went with it, besides, they had tanks… what was the worst that could happen?

It turned out that the worst that could happen was armoured warfare in Washington. Hence, the CIA decided later to move their main Headquarters down south to Langley, Virginia. They are not, contrary to popular belief, actually retarded, it's just that it's difficult if not impossible for them to defy the direct order of Congress. If you would like to dislike someone for being idiotic in their vocabulary and terminology, please direct your ire at the US Congressmen who were in service in 1957. Thank you for your patience.

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><p><em>Europe, July 4-15 1957<em>

July 4, 1957 was the day of the one event, if there could be only one event counted, that ensured Stalin's eventual death would be slow, painful, and mind-breaking. This one thing made sure that no matter what, it would never be as merciful as the traditional mad dictator execution of sandblaster (with coarse salt) followed by or combined with petrol dousing and ignition. It also ensured that SI would fully assist the Allies in offensive operations for the duration of the war despite the earlier contention over Allied experiments with Sarin on Allied servicemen. It also helped prevent the debate in America from being won by the isolationists, and thus, in good time, brought America into the war. That set the stage for World War Four, but that is beside the point for now.

It was fortunate that SI tanks had always used wide-angle periscopes to look outside and had gas filters on all air intakes, even engine intakes, though these could be switched out of the air flow. A cloud of some sort of spray rose over Dresden and settled on the city, sprayed by low-flying aircraft, air-burst artillery shells and Soviet vehicles. By the time the SI armoured columns had slagged anything remotely Soviet in their way and reached the eastern outskirts of the city, every mammal and most other vertebrates that had originally been living in the city at the time of Soviet encirclement and occupation were dead. The armoured columns thundered through the city, taking the hazmat-suited NKVD personnel in the city by surprise while they were still spraying their gas everywhere and scourging the city for survivors. Needless to say, the NKVD men did not go anywhere, breathe, or do anything else (decomposition excluded) on their own after that. The only thing preventing the tanks from just running over all the bodies completely was the need for identification once the area cleared, just to be able to know who it was that committed, authorized, etc. this heinous crime.

The gas was positively identified as Sarin, and from captured NKVD documents taken out of shredded Soviet units once they were taken by surprise from behind by a thundering herd of very angry tanks, it was effectively the entire Soviet stock, deployed as a large-scale test. There would be no more for a few weeks as the main factories had broken down with all the overtime they had to pull to amass this much of the short-shelf-life substance. Two days later, Extermination Order Number One, which had been against secret police units in Axis service, was quickly amended to include NKVD personnel. Since the USSR had never signed the Geneva Convention, the only thing that held the Allied troops remotely in check was that fact that the Soviet conscripts knew absolutely nothing about any gas or anything and only the NKVD was responsible. Technically, the other Allies' taking of any prisoners at all was because the top command ranks had ordered that prisoners not be killed as a gesture of respect for the harsh POW-protection rules enforced by SI among its own troops. However, the NKVD was fair game, even for Shepard's men and women now that the SI European Theatre was formally at DEFCON 1 which meant Extermination Orders were fully approved.

The counter to Sarin was delivered to the front fairly quickly, spraying Dresden, what was left of it, with a massive amount of lime and slaked lime, the main bases they could find, to break Sarin down into phosphoric acid derivatives. However, it was still several days before toxin levels dropped enough for unsuited personnel to be allowed to enter the city. SI troops hung around for the first three days afterward, bringing over 700,000 intact corpses out from the city. Like in World War Two, it had been a shelter to well over half a million refugees seeking protection from the invading army, though this one was Soviet and not Allied, plus the original population.

They sure didn't find it in Dresden… unless death was considered the ultimate protection. The remaining bodies dug out from mounds of rubble by the Allies were usually so mutilated and in such an advanced stage of decay that they were unidentifiable. In addition to the 1,057,138 identified bodies extracted by various Allied forces, a large number of dismembered corpses, unidentifiable remains, and missing persons, estimated to represent approximately 250,000 more individuals, mostly (by the size of the body parts) children, were dumped in a big hole in the ground. It had been dug out by the relatively silent efforts of a thousand T-1955s while the rest were sifting through the city streets, acting as wagons and ploughs for the hundreds of thousands of bodies. These were identified, tagged, and buried one by one, side by side and spaced out a bit, in the trenches dug out and headstones put up for each and every identified body. As for the Quarter-Million Pit, it was for now capped by a monolithic cobbled box of steel, welded together from the scrap hull plates of many destroyed Soviet T-55s and other Soviet vehicles as a hulking monument to Stalin's sins.

Inscribed in the front, by armour-piercing bullets from machine-guns, were the words "In the ground beneath this monument lie a quarter-million unnamed victims of Stalin's lunacy, murdered by the mass deployment of Sarin gas against the German city of Dresden on July 4, 1957. Around you in this vast cemetery lie over one million identified victims. We the Allied Nations swear revenge for this heinous crime, to be extracted from Stalin himself." In smaller letters carved in by a drill beneath that were the words "This temporary monument was erected on July 7, 1957, three days after the perpetration of the most concentrated war crime in human history against the City of Dresden by the Soviet Union's NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, on the orders of Joseph Stalin."

A list of every now-missing person known to have been in Dresden before the attack, the people who were in the pit, was submitted to Allied European Supreme Command for composition. They would be recognized as soon as possible in the form of a war memorial to be placed over the Quarter-Million Pit, with the possibility of making the city a permanent UN Heritage Site to be preserved as a lesson for all posterity. The media coverage of the event was total and uncensored (well, an SI Black Ops squad did break into CNN headquarters and force them to not censor the more gruesome images) right down to the bloody claw marks on walls and doors as people died, their fingers worn down to the bone. Piles of dead people were broadcast, many decaying already by the time their final moments were captured. Several children's diaries were found and trumpeted around the world, for example, the famous lines from a girl who had been shot dead in her apartment home after an NKVD man in a suit broke down the front door. They had been written in an untidy scrawl "Daddy says to seal all the air entrances to our home and to wait for help… we're all hoping the Soviets don't find us while they hunt in the city… Someone kicked the front door open downstairs and I'm hearing gunshots and screams… I'm scared." Needless to say, that same NKVD man, captured leaving the small apartment building after searching every nook and cranny for survivors, met a very slow, painful end as a toxicology test subject. It was an option that was usually left only when EO-covered personnel were not executed by their all-too-willing captors.

The washing of blood and other dried bodily fluids from the grilles of the "chicken-cage" slat armour was done on July Eighth in a sort of silent mourning as the seven divisions gathered south of the City of Ghosts as it was now called. It was almost ritualistic with the silence in which the washing was carried out, the soldiers standing in the rain, scrubbing at the panels of glorified dense-mesh fencing attached outside the exterior armour layer of their tanks. It also had to be scrubbed from the outer armour, and this was done once the slat armour was unbolted and unlocked from the main plating. Some body parts had to also be scraped off, mostly the half-rotten remains of intestines from the last batches of bodies, many too decayed and bloated to not rupture with their piling onto the slat armour by SI troops numbed to the piles of bodies. The veterans, who had been chosen to stay on and not retire from the army life, had begun numb after seeing the horrors of World War Two, the Syngman Rhee Massacres, the North Korean Purges, the First Palestine War, and more. The newer troops were horrified, to be sure, but after days of heaving corpses onto vehicle decks to be carted away they too were numbed.

However, even as they left washed-off blood, other bodily fluids, and bits and pieces of people behind, one thing was clear, over the Supreme Command Channel, Hannah Shepard's voice stated loud and clear "Men and women of Shepard Industries, repeat after me:" She started speaking in bite-sized chunks to help the process "We hereby swear that we will see the war through to its finish, we hereby swear that Stalin will receive the long and painful death he deserves. We swear that we will ensure our children and their children after that never forget Dresden. This we swear, this we swear, that WE will never forget Dresden."

The columns moved south like a tsunami, into the hilly terrain of the Czech border and blazing through, annihilating Soviet Tesla Coil and Flame Tower defences with massive artillery and rocket bombardments. They were, for obvious reasons, ignoring ammo consumption so long as supplies, no matter how taxed, could keep up. By the end of the Dresden Offensive as it was later called, the Czech Republic and Austria were thoroughly free of Soviet forces. Those who refused to surrender before AND after initial engagement and encirclement were not waited out but instead bombarded into the ground and crushed as they routed. There was no time to take prisoners in the middle of battle if the element of shock was to be maintained and the massive breakthrough exploited. The mountainous terrain made Tesla Coil mediocre, unlike the North German Plain, so by the end of the offensive only about 200 disabling events were incurred to the tanks. The vast majority of THOSE had been repaired already (quite a number of spare engines parts were used) by quickly-deployed Service Depots from their supporting MCV-1956s. Of course, about 50 tanks had been thoroughly slagged or shot up beyond repair, but that was acceptable given the thousands of Soviet vehicles left as twisted, burning hulks in their wake and the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Red Army corpses and prisoners.

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><p>The Red Army prisoners would be given a choice: either work in factories SI operated for a small wage, or spend their time rotting away in POW camps. Needless to say, there were reasons why in previous wars and this one, SI-operated POW camps stayed within acceptable sizes and numbers. Being pressed into forced labour was something the prisoners, especially the Red Army prisoners, expected. Being treated reasonably well, and of all things paid for their work, even the small salary they were getting, was NOT something the prisoners expected, AT ALL. Despite the niceties, Hannah and Jane were not stupid and only let them sign up for work in factories that supplied other Allied armies or produced second-line equipment (which, of course, was still quite good). Only loyal, veteran, fully-paid workers were used in the first-line hardware factories. In fact, it was a difficult line of work to get into, and many SI veterans, after retiring, tended to work in the first-line factories as a way of living. After all, there were only so many contracts for consultant, advisor, or trainer positions with the new, budding militaries of decolonized nations…<p>

Salaries were decent for the regular factory workers, though during the over-clocking period, producing 300 T-1955s a month, even dropping most of the civilian stuff (no POWs or new hands to take any of the burden), they had gotten a lot of overtime pay as assembly lines were moved around or workers redistributed to a war footing. Now, they were in a more stable schedule, shifting non-critical jobs or lines over to the low-wage labour that POWs represented. Obviously there were guards to supervise work, but they rarely had to do anything. If you did something really stupid—like attack a guard—you'd probably get shot, or if you try to sabotage something go to jail, but other than that, the guards did their best to be friendly. It was quite logical "If you don't hurt the prisoners much, they will rarely want to hurt you, and willing labour is so much more efficient and attractive, to everybody—INCLUDING THE MEDIA—than forced labour…" In fact, it was so attractive that prisoners of war had to be divided into groups, to take TURNS manning the factories. After all, you didn't get bored into madness by lack of something to do, and you got PAID!

This may also have contributed to the high immigration application rate from war prisoners after World War Two. That is somewhat beside the point, other than the fact that much of the current main labour force, now that the old hands from the company's founding were beginning to retire, was made of ex-POWs who decided to settle down in Canada. They only found out AFTER they had decided to settle and stay working at SI that they were given preferential treatment in worker or soldier recruitment, because most of the ex-Axis was now Allied.

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><p>The Allied Armies kept pushing east in a rage-driven onslaught that smashed any Soviet counterattacks in their way, hurling themselves all the way to Warsaw before being stopped temporarily by a lack of supplies. It was on the Twelfth of July that the SI troops on the Polish-Slovakian border, preparing for a thrust south to Hungary and to isolate Soviet forces in Yugoslavia, got the horrible news of the Soviets clinging onto the North German Plain suddenly sweeping south. All became clear in a flash to Hannah Shepard, the gassing of Dresden was only a diversion! Maybe the same was also true of the Finland invasion, as the Allied fleets in the Baltic, along with a good handful of SI warships, had been smothered form the air and underwater with bombs, rockets, missiles and torpedoes. Sweden was obviously doomed, and so was Norway… the evacuation of the governments had already begun as the Soviets pushed into Sweden, while she was helpless. Well, she did persuade via Spec Ops the Swedish to collapse most of their iron mines, by installing and detonating charges underground that would destroy the mining facilities, which could not be rebuilt very quickly.<p>

The Soviets swept south, encroaching on Berlin and endangering Allied supply lines, while at the same time threatening the now-crucial secondary supply lines running through the Czech Republic by sending two infantry divisions to infiltrate the Sudeten Mountains on the northeast border of the Czech Republic. Stalin hoped the mountainous terrain would make infantry more effective than on flat ground, and for once he was right about something. Nadia's plan to exhaust the Allies' offensive capability temporarily had to a large extent paid off, and a strategic envelopment was in the works. It was time for the Allies to count their blessings.

Blessing Number One: SI vehicles were designed to have extra internal space which could carry a few extra passengers or up to twice the standard issue amount of all supplies except water, for that, each vehicle was fitted with several hundred litres of storage tanks. The T-1955 with its new spaced armour could even fit extra supplies such as blankets bound for the front inside that spacing… but usually this was not used, at 300% supplies (fuel, ammo and food stocks) plus the standard equipment (camouflage kits, mounted dozer blade, basic repair kit, some spare armour panels, field cooking gear, etc.) the thing did after all weigh 100 tons combat-ready already. The other Allies' observers (they all observed each others' vehicle trials) had mostly facepalmed, sighed, shook their head, or any combination thereof when they were told just what "combat-ready weight" really meant.

Blessing Number Two: The vehicles had on July 11th fully stocked up on all supplies in preparation for the Slovakian Offensive, to 300% typical mission load. In other words, the 110mm guns of the T-1955s had, instead of 50 rounds each, 150 rounds. Of course, only 50 were easily available to the autoloader and the other would need to be moved around into the main ammo racks manually from the stowage areas. Incidentally, this occupied much of the space near the vehicle's centerline, and was split into two wet-stowage magazines with separate emergency vent systems, but that was beside the point.

Blessing Number Three: SI Sixth through Twelfth Field Divisions, all their front-line land forces in Europe were pretty close to the Sudeten Mountains, in fact, they were only 130 to 150 kilometers east of them, four hours of driving. It would have been three as the crow flies at economy speed… but for the mountains.

Blessing Number Four: By the time the Allies had really bothered to count their blessings, the two westernmost Field Divisions, the Twelfth and Eleventh, were already on-site and (often literally) squashing the Soviet infantry and outpost—complete with ConYard—into the ground.

It was a short and decisive victory for the Allies there, but their problems were just beginning. The next five Field Divisions came barrelling through just as an Allied infantry group came in to secure the area, and all seven Divisions thundered southeast to cut off the head of the Soviet offensive pushing slowly west into Czech and Austrian territory. The Reds were sustaining heavy losses but further scorching the earth of that nation. The ensuing major battles, not counting the constant combat as the columns stormed south, at Ostrava, Zlin, and Bratislava effectively cut off the Soviet forces advancing on Brno and Wien. Twelfth and Eleventh Divisions had stayed between Olomouc and Ostrava, Tenth and Ninth just southwest of Zlin, and the other three, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth, just northwest of Bratislava. Once the three cities had been cleared of Soviet armour, the units spread out by deploying MCVs and defensive fortifications. The Soviets were forced to turn their main units back from the merciless hammering resistance offered by Allied, primarily French in this case, armoured divisions to save their supply routes, or die trying.

The west coast of the Morava River was very useful as a staging point for an ambush… and the Soviets bought the farm pretty fast along its length. Their breakthrough attempts were at Olomouc, Hodonin, and just west of Bratislava. The Soviets built Sub Pens and transports without difficulty, and loaded up their troops for transport when aerial recon reported no Allied armoured forces in the immediate vicinity of the east coast of the river. One-third of the units tasked to the counterattack had made it across the river—the bridges were mined—by transport when the first artillery shells began dropping on top of their heads at Hodonin. The other sites soon experienced the same sort of phenomenon. At the same time, the remaining two-thirds of the Soviet forces were rather surprised when the rumbling of the ground from tanks behind them remained even after all the Soviet vehicles had shut down their engines… The engagement was even shorter than typical, since the 110mm main gun of the T-1955 could penetrate the 10cm back armour of a T-55 and core the Soviet vehicle at any and all practical ranges whatsoever.

Snorkels, it was found, were useful for a lot more than just hiding underwater. They were also useful for hiding under a healthy coating of dirt as the tanks dug small trenches for themselves and the crews of supporting APCs put a layer of branches, leaves and dirt over the tops of the vehicles. The APCs left the tanks, with only snorkels, guns and periscopes peering out of the dirt, buried halfway up their track pods in the front and effectively the whole way on the rest of the sides. They had stayed motionless, inactive and completely hidden as Soviet air scouts flew overhead and Soviet armour rolled by, and then, once the bombardment was over, they pounced.

For obvious reasons, the snorkels were also used for the west bank ambush, tanks wading out of the reedier parts of the river after the Soviet vehicles had turned around to face their much more powerful adversaries. It was, to quote one SI veteran who did not wish to be named, "almost tedious to clean up the Soviets". Only a few T-1955s were disabled or destroyed, since the Scud launchers, artillery and rocket artillery pieces of the Soviets were the first to go.

As soon as that was done and over with the SI tanks went over the river (after clearing out the mines they had planted on the bridges, which the Soviets couldn't do thanks to sniper fire) and wiped out all the Soviets to the west. There were several friendly fire incidents with Allied units that had ground up the Soviet's rearguard, but the SI units didn't shoot back. Allied tanks these days were pretty distinctive at least in Europe with their single barrels, though some old T-50s were still in service. Allied sabot shells were also distinctive as they didn't have the explosions HEAT shells produced. The SI groups didn't have any vehicles disabled thanks to thick composite armour, but they did have to replace a few panels of the outer armour and patch up a couple road wheels after sabots from the 90mm guns punched through …

The Allied troops on the other hand, once they stopped firing and made sure they were facing friendly forces by talking over the radio to a lot of annoyed sarcastic replies, got a good earful. Mostly the yelling was about looking to see if the other tank's second barrel was anywhere close to the size of the first before shooting at it, after all, only one barrel being long enough to stick out well past the front of the vehicle was a big difference from Soviet tanks where both were long and thick. According to popular consensus, the Soviets were trying and failing to compensate for something… and failing epically, since they didn't have the balls to actually lay siege to Dresden.

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><p><em>Yugoslavia, Late July, 1957<em>

According to Hannah's intel reports, the spies and infiltrators of the other Allies along with her strike teams were taking care of Soviet Sarin production adequately. However there was one major compound, the largest of all, in the Balkans, near Belgrade, that they simply couldn't get into due to the over-fortification of the area. She needed to deal with that one as soon as possible to end this Sarin Gas problem once and for all, though destruction of new factories by infiltrators or strategic bombing continued throughout the war. The Berlin area was holding thanks to the massive Allied forces arrayed there against the Soviet push, so she could strategically afford dropping this brick on Stalin's boot. Sure, that boot might make it more painful for the Balkans underneath its sole with the greater pressure the brick falling on it would impart, but hopefully Stalin would be too busy clutching his foot and howling to put the boot back down for a bit.

It would be very foolish to deploy all her forces into the region, in case surprise was lost too soon and the Soviet Sarin gas convoy trucks escaped one way or another. She was currently near Zagreb, which the last of the Soviets' current stores of Sarin were being transported. The convoy was headed for a river outpost, and she needed to hunt down all the trucks before they could escape. This time, immediately deploying a huge army wasn't really a great idea in case the element of surprise was lost and the trucks got away to dump another chemical apocalypse on another city. It was well known to the soldiers now that Sarin could be quickly dealt with by spraying the air with basic solution to scrub it out and degrade it into harmlessness. That knowledge did nothing for the fact that they still had to destroy the trucks, or at least disable them, first before they could dispose of the Sarin they carried.

Fortunately, their vehicles had been designed to operate under nuclear, biological and chemical conditions after the nuclear tests of the late 1940s and early 1950s proved a need to filter out radiation and irradiated gases for vehicles entering a blast zone immediately after a detonation. The older SI-built vehicles had been upgraded to include the "NBC" protection, including those in the service of their allies and client states. Both of the latter categories needed to buy maintenance contracts from them, but their client states had a big discount on the contracts, even though they needed to pay a Membership Fee each quarter-year as a client state, basically, surprisingly [cost-]effective protection money. Of course, if a client state backed out, its quarterly maintenance contract fees rose to match that of non-client states, and it no longer had the umbrella of protection from what was probably the fifth most powerful military on the planet. The order from the strongest back in 1955 went, according to most analysts: USSR, US, Britain, France, SI, Germany, etc.. However, in terms of coming out of nowhere like lightning from a clear sky, the ordering was rather… different.

An MCV-1956 was sent in and deployed itself before setting up a couple of power plants, a Field Refinery, Barracks, War Factory, Service Depot and a handful of Gun Turrets, cheaper and more resistant to damage than tanks. Hannah had determined that if everyone else strip-mined materials in the field then she was foolish to stay out of it, especially after the invention of the OT-1957 (Ore Tank 1957), which shared many of the same parts of the T-1955, up to and including a 110mm main armament plus a flamethrower secondary armament. This was installed in a WM-20C mount (20 decimetres diameter, third main model) and another mount of the 15dm size was placed near the rear of the vehicle on the top of the hull. The S-WM-20Cs were the same mounts as were used in the T-1955 series, and the S-WM-15Cs were the smaller counterparts used for mounting everything from a dual 40mm gun turret to a Hedgehog anti-sub mortar turret to a set of antiaircraft missiles on various assorted warships. Anti-shipping missiles were planned and would likely also use the same mounts, though in the case of the Ore Tank anti-air missiles were essentially the universal choice. Sure, the smaller-sized and lower-range missiles SI had developed were no threat to high-flying strategic bombers, but the basic design could be, with reasonable ease, adapted for ship-to-air, ground-to-air or air-to-air duty against close air support.

The first part of the convoy came west down the road, a handful of T-55s and a truck, headed for some rendezvous to the west of the riverside refuelling station. This was not expected, as it would ruin the surprise a lot earlier than she'd planned for. Hannah hadn't smuggled more than a handful of T-1955s into the operations area yet, but it was time to engage… and so she did, using her two Ore Tanks, which were heavy vehicles, well-armed and acceptably armoured, plus what T-1955s she had, to engage the enemy. Since they all had frontal one-shot-kill capability against the T-1955 at up to medium range (0.8 to 2 kilometers), and could penetrate the sides at essentially any range their sabots could reach, they could make their first shots count. They had to make their first shots count, or the Soviet gas trucks could very well escape.

It turned out the bags of soda lime strapped to the outsides of the vehicles were also useful for protection, sandbag style. They were for neutralizing spilled Sarin as much as possible, since at high pH values (highly basic) the volatile liquid broke down into phosphoric acid derivatives rather readily. The sacks had stopped several rockets short… moments before the rocket launcher troops were mown down or burnt to death, the pyres of the Soviet tanks already sending columns of thick, oily smoke into the air. Hannah had completely forgotten to account for that smoke, and it meant the element surprise was lost anyways… Still, the disabled Sarin trucks quickly became the target of containment and neutralization protocols, namely pumping the Sarin into a soda lime and water sludge. Since Sarin was miscible (infinitely mixable) with water, this meant the chemical quickly degraded in the basic solution.

There were two bridges the Soviet ore trucks could be trying to escape through. One was to Hannah's base's north, one to her south. Her troops had already mined the northern one thoroughly, but the southern one wasn't ready yet and her reinforcements, abandoning all pretenses of stealth and trampling their way into the operation area from the northwest, might not get there in time. However, intelligence feeds from a radar station she had managed to capture told her that the Soviets were still trying to figure out what had happened. Needless to say, this meant that there was enough time to lock down the southern bridge. A few minutes later, she launched her main attack from the west, her base in the area, to hit the Soviets' main base in the area, situated to her east. Rocket artillery and howitzers opened fire first, to soften up the Tesla Coil defences as much as possible.

There were still a few Tesla Coils operational by the time the flood of tanks swamped the Soviet base, in addition to some apparently experimental Soviet tech—Tesla Tanks—firing back. It was a rather painful experience for the SI tanks as they charged, since quite a handful were destroyed or disabled before they could pound their opposition into scrap. However, ceramic composite armour, with the plastic mesh insulating electric currents over most of the armour, and more insulation around the openings in the ceramic, still proved its superiority. It was able to channel most of the electric current straight into the ground and the armour only melted part-way through instead of a large pit of slagged metal, thanks to the ceramic slowing down heat transmission and reinforcing the metal.

Ceramics and clays were some of the few things that could not be effectively mined by the mining teams that worked in the "Ore Wells" that had allowed the so-called strip-mining process to work, small teams of specialists and machinery working underground and dumping their finds outside the main shafts for military trucks to collect. The other Allies were fighting cheaply, expending less money, since supplies could be partly dealt with on-site and raw resources too to an extent. However, she did not believe wars should be cheap, she believed they should be quickly resolved, or it would become too commonplace to be at war and that would be bad for world stability. Still, even though recent advancements in refinery technology had meant more value could be extracted from the ores to be sold on the global market, she did not use it to "buy" units. The reason was simple: Why bother making her field commanders buy units when she could obliterate her enemies and then mine the area to her heart's content?

Apparently, no one else saw it that way, even Gunter didn't support sending in a vast army to begin with since he'd seen first-hand how much it consumed in supplies, especially ammunition and fuel. With the Soviet subs controlling the convoy routes, minus her routes—they'd learned rather quickly that it wasn't worth the number of subs lost and the double armoured hulls plus skirt armour of the freighters made sinking one take over half a sub's torpedo stock if it was manoeuvring at all—it seemed that the Field Refinery was really catching on. Still it seemed an overly budget-cutting way of waging war to Hannah that in fact made it all the more expensive in the long run. It was almost as if some force was preventing the other factions from seeing it her way… but that was good for her, so she didn't bother questioning it so much. Some things, it was better not to know.

The Soviets in the area were, for obvious reasons, annihilated to the last man and last Sarin truck. The toxin was a liquid, a volatile liquid, so they pumped it into the bottoms of more-or-less sealed basic-solution-filled tanks to break it down to harmless substances. For obvious reasons, some of the liquid storage tanks, having sustained damage during the battle, had to be handled by hazmat-suited soldiers and the area thoroughly sprayed down by a cloud of basic solutions. Even then, no one wandered outside unsuited for fear of the consequences after some captured Soviets were shoved outside and died horrible deaths from residual Sarin plus alkali inhalation. Maybe they'd sprayed the area a bit too thoroughly…

For several years after its formation, the Republic of Croatia would bemoan the "salting" of quite a stretch of farmland near its capital, Zagreb. They even pulled the card that Sarin does not endure natural conditions well and would have degraded within a few weeks or months, unlike the excess alkali the area had been sprayed in making it difficult to grow crops for years to come. However, when the Shepards rather pointedly asked if they would have preferred the Sarin gas to have vaporized and drifted all over their territory like it had in Dresden, they abruptly shut up.

The next order of business was bludgeoning their way through the main surviving Sarin production facility near Belgrade, but Hannah waited a few hours to see if anything could be salvaged from the Tesla Tanks and Soviet Tech Center, about Tesla technology. Unfortunately, the Soviets were quite thorough in hiding their tech, and Hanna grudgingly admitted that maybe this sort of compartmentalization in MCV warfare made sense after all. At least it kept her from getting some of the Soviets' best secrets. In the meantime, she had disassembled the eleven T-1955s that had been completely destroyed in the attack on the Soviet base and used her Field Refineries to re-smelt the metal plates (the pulverized ceramic was simply discarded), it seemed the Refineries were able to do something after all. Yes, T-1955s might be very thickly armoured, but since this made them attract all sorts of fire, they tended to get badly over-killed once they did succumb. This phenomenon would later be observed with all heavy or super-heavy tanks, as enemies would smother them with fire to try to make sure they were dead.

The convoy's route was traced to an underground facility west of Belgrade, suspected to be a hidden back door to the Soviets' main Sarin facility, which was defended by a wall of Tesla Coils that had dominating fields of fire over the main and only pass into the facility's area. That, coupled with the BM-21s, Scud missile launchers, and other units guarding the pass, meant going straight in would be suicidal.

Maybe that was why the Soviets shipped their Sarin out form the back door of the installation? The underground facility was rather large, but not exactly well-designed… why were all the turrets attached to consoles that could self-destruct them? No one knew, but most speculate that it had to do with the paranoia the Soviets tended to have between the NKVD and Red Army. Anyways, the assault was an interesting urban warfare scenario…

It began with a small group of SI Assault Infantry and a handful of Field Medics plus an Infiltrator making their way into the base from the western door, the one not inside the actual compound. Assault Infantry were equipped with a Battle Rifle, a Pistol and a Rocket Launcher, whereas Medics had a BR, field surgeon kit, and Pistol and Infiltrators had a silenced BR and silenced Pistol.

The first group of Soviet guards were taken utterly by surprise and mown down before they could get an alarm off. A hidden alcove revealed a console that the Infiltrator quickly wired up, causing the Flame Tower directly ahead of them to blow up, much to the strike team's amazement. The Assault Infantrymen had been contemplating the nasty prospect of blowing the tower with a volley of rocket launcher fire… they didn't have to do that now.

A square room with a low ceiling restricted the range of the next flame towers, and so the team, after mowing down the Soviet infantry present, detoured north, killing two scientists and detonating the northern of the two Flame Towers. Taking the uniform from a scientist who had been shot in the head, the Infiltrator made his way south and hitched a ride in a Soviet truck to another art of the facility, from there, he shot an attack dog dead with his silenced Battle Rifle before taking a console and wiring the southern Flame Tower to blow. The Assault Infantry moved up and gunned down more Attack Dogs before they could charge. Then they pushed forward into the installation, blowing up explosive barrels, killing dogs and Soviets alike. Eventually they came to a room with two Tesla Coils, detonating one and reprogramming the other to attack the Soviet T-55 coming down a hallway from the east. An experimental super-heavy tank was found in a later room, but activation of two Tesla Coils took it down. The Infiltrator next blew up three more flame towers, and the men went on their way after two hours in the installation, opening up the gates through the installation for an armoured strike force to roll through the very wide hallways.

On the other side, the squadron of infiltrators, comprising 30 T-1955s, scouted the area, finding the main Soviet base to be due south of them but too heavily defended to attack immediately. The northeast outpost, feeding power to the Tesla Coil wall, was lightly defended on the western side, and there were barrels of fuel oil around the Power Plants and Advanced Power Plants. That went up in a sea of fire soon after the T-1955s reached line of sight of the facility. The Tesla coil grid was then disassembled by various means i.e. tank gun fire before the main armoured wave rolled into the operational area through the valley, spreading out in the flat ground south of the valley. The artillery came first, other than the initial armoured vanguard, and set up their weapons, firing already while the other units were filtering in. The concrete walls of the Soviet base were mauled brutally in relatively short order after that, though the artillery were careful and firing at relatively short range so as to not destroy the Sarin storage facilities by accident. They wanted the clean-up to be as easy as possible, not gas a significant portion of Yugoslavia… hence they were not able to target the in-depth Soviet defences.

After the bombardment levelled the front lines of defences, the armoured units surged into the base, pushing concrete rubble ahead of them for a small degree of portable cover and firing everything they had at the Soviet threats. The super-heavy tank of the Soviets, of which there were a few more here, proved problematic as the alpha strikes of the T-1955s could not punch right through, unlike almost all other tanks to date (the only other tank able to resist the WTC-110-65A's alpha strike was the T-1955 itself). Their 120mm guns were also able to inflict severe damage on the T-1955s by the size of the HEAT shells. The three super-heavy tanks were destroyed at the cost of two T-1955s destroyed in direct tank-to-tank combat, thanks to the sheer volume of fire thrown at the Soviet tanks to smother them. However, the Tesla Coils also cost a number of T-1955s, despite the insulation the ceramic layer provided blunting their strikes. There was also the fact that they had to watch their fire to not blow up the Sarin storage facilities—which were right next to fuel barrels, annoyingly— These factors put together meant the T-55s were surviving much longer than usual, and doling out more damage by sheer volume of HEAT shell fire.

In the end though the swamping of tanks meant that the Soviets were finished, though the fighting was rather bitter, and the Sarin containment facilities were captured. The liquid Sarin was then passed into the bottom of another alkaline tank and thus degraded, for now, the world could heave a sigh of relieve at the aversion of a chemical apocalypse. Stalin's focus seemed to shift away from Sarin anyways once it was found that the shelf life of the gas was very short, too short now that production was being interrupted all the time by spec ops squads and bombing. It would no longer be possible to build up strategically significant reserves of liquid Sarin, so they might as well not bother trying again now that the last major stocks were destroyed.

Post-battle analysis revealed some interesting things, such as the fact that the new Soviet tanks had a notable edge over the T-1955 in terms of firepower, though the 1955's composite armour made it more than a match for the new Soviet tank prototype in that regard. The Soviets had also managed to try to copy the four-track-pod transmission of the T-1955, and managed to outweigh the heaviest SI tank by quite a margin. It was impressive… and even more staggeringly expensive than the T-1955, despite being glacially slow in comparison to the "Speed Devil" tank. At least, that was the nickname some Allied troops gave it after watching the tank run by and noticing the tracks' were interrupted after going over any ramp-like hill strong enough to not be flattened by the weight, thanks to the tank temporarily becoming airborne. For obvious reasons, the Soviets could not make the same claim. Oh, and their armour was actually somewhat vulnerable to Tesla technology, like the other Allies' units, while the ceramic layer in SI armour meant at least 2 or even 3 shots were needed to punch through. Even then, it would most likely only slag the engine, which was at the front of both the T-1945 (Raider II) and T-1955.

However, it was noted that the Soviets had no internal connection or crew transfer between the turret and hull, which meant the vehicle, even with its huge turret, could not store a very large number of extra shells for the guns. This design aspect was unlike SI tanks which tended to have a LOT of extra shells stored away in wet stowage. It seemed the Soviets' idea as to why a T-1955 usually didn't go up as a catastrophic kill, instead only being a mobility kill even after the glacis was penetrated, was that the turret was not actually linked on the inside with the hull. Hence they had ripped off that design aspect, and it more or less worked in that hull penetrations that eventually stopped the Soviet tanks didn't kill them completely, but it was found that hitting them with enough shells from one side at the same time could tear the turret off completely. However this only happened to one tank and by accident when 15 T-1955s plastered the front of its turret with sabots in a single volley of fire (essentially at the same time). The armour was thick enough to only result in the inside of the armour looking like a wall of spikes, but the impulse was enough to shred the mount and thus render the tank disabled, and one more shell to the weakened armour punched through, setting off the ammunition and blowing the top cupola and bottom decking of the turret out.

The new Soviet tank gun was somewhat worrying, since four or five shots to the same _small_ area (particle stream zones must overlap directly) of a T-1955's forward hull using HEAT shells would be able to defeat the slat, outer and main armour, but that was okay. T-1955s were cheap enough to deploy in larger numbers than the Soviet tanks, and only one or two sabot shells to the same _general_ area would punch through the side of the new Soviet tank (600mm of steel just wasn't practical). The front armour needed two or three shots to the same general area, but with the new autoloader system the SI tank would have a theoretical firing rate of 12 shots per minute whereas the Soviets could fire each gun only about 8 times per minute. The SI tank could practically run circles around the Soviet tank, that meant most engagements would allow the T-1955 a good chance against the Soviet tank. Of course, there had to be considered the fact that these were prototypes, so the actual product of the Soviet tank program would likely be a superior weapon to the T-1955 qualitatively, if not quantitatively. Still, tactics would win battles, such as what happened to the last Soviet tank: its primary rangefinders had been blinded by lit flamethrower fuel sprayed onto it, giving a few moments of not firing before the Soviets resorted to a secondary system.

On the other hand, with seven months of full-scale war production, about 2100 more T-1955s had arrived on the front lines, meaning that with the 3600 already produced, the nine divisions SI fielded in Europe and the Middle East had access to about 5700 T-1955s. Each division required a bit over 700 tanks for a full tank complement. In other words, other than one of the Palestinian divisions, namely Third Division, every division in the two Theatres had been fully outfitted with T-1955s.

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><p><em>August 1, 1957<em>

As of August 1, 1957, the SI dispersal of units was as follows:

1st and 2nd Field Divisions in North Korea, armoured units concentrated along the Pyongyang-Wonsan area with motorized infantry picket units extending toward the borders, cooperating with the Socialist Republic of North Korea Self-Defence Force they helped train. They are to protect the country from potential Republic of Korea, People's Republic of China, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics aggression. A few Logistics Brigades are in the area as support and if need be combat auxiliaries. These brigades also serve in disaster relief and encouraging healthy agricultural and hygienic practices. They are also responsible for breathing down the necks of the National Department of Health and Agriculture to make sure it's doing its job properly, although these random checkups are truly random, occurring generally on a whim of the Pacific Theatre Commander, currently still Admiral Williams. This increases the chances of catching problems (no time to cover things up), and the same happens with the Ministry of Education and relatively new school boards.

3rd and 4th Field Divisions are in the Middle East, 4th Field Division is currently occupying Syria (the country's attempt to throw its lot in with the Soviets backfired) and intimidating Iraq while 3rd Division is stationed near the Sinai (Egyptian) and Jordanian borders. Their supporting Logistics Brigade is mostly involved in improving the quality of life in Syria and rooting out corruption, so as to increase popular support for SI and ideally bring a formerly totally hostile Arab country under Hannah and Jane's sway. Note that 4th Division is now fully outfitted with T-1955s.

5th Field Division has the unsavoury job of keeping the peace in Algeria, right next door to Soviet-friendly Libya. However, the Algerians are generally SI-friendly after their liberation in World War Two, and the PMC has poured enough money into public infrastructure and healthcare that they are, according to the latest polls, very agreeable to having their government pay the organization the Membership Fees. Occasional skirmishes dot the Libyan border, but as the Libyans have yet to obtain Soviet tanks with the Mediterranean Blockade and Egypt's unwillingness to sell hardware, they have nothing that came close to matching the old but still useful Raider IIDs Fifth Division is currently equipped with. Local Logistics Brigades are heavily involved in everything from escorting caravans from bandits to healthcare system inspections, which only further their public support ratings.

6th through 12th Field Divisions are, as readers of this archive should know, fully fitted with T-1955s and currently embattled in southern Europe against the Soviet forces in the Balkans. To be specific, they surrounded and destroyed a Soviet Army-sized unit north of Sarajevo on July 31, and are duelling it out with Soviet forces as they hammer south toward the Greece Line.

Tanya and her Spec Ops squad are in Poland on assignment…

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><p>AN: Well, I'm getting rid of the Allies' over-reliance on plot armour, and making real the impracticality of Tesla Coil tech (on the other hand, expect Obelisks of Light to be as powerful as they were in-game). In the race of Mantle vs. Mantle, it is unsurprising that Kane, to truly understand why his burden is going to be safe with the Shepards, will take a LOT of wars and tries to actually sort of win one (the Last Tiberium War) as is required of him. He will have a worthy successor indeed…

Sadly for me and what I was looking up a few days ago, in search of methods of gruesomely murdering characters, SOME THINGS CANNOT BE UN-READ… I should explain below… VIEWER DISCRETION IS STRONGLY ADVISED…

I just found out about some of the cannibalism stuff out there on the internet, especially a… GUIDE to roasting women alive, impaled on a spit (basically, how to impale them without killing them until they actually cook to death, note that this is essentially impossible for men). I have just acquired new ideas about the war crimes that will be perpetrated between now and the end of this particular saga. Unless there are significant, and I mean absolutely huge, changes in the role of the Batarians in Mass Effect 3, humanity will see retribution for the various sins that Batarians perpetrate against their slaves and captives, and by retribution I mean TOTAL ANNIHILATION. The galaxy will be forcibly mapped more thoroughly, and multiple sentient species considered too powerful biologically for their poor mindsets or mental evolution will be dealt with permanently, such as the Yahg. In other words, if they do not have the concept of loyalty and mercy (even Krogan have this, though it is uncommon, they WILL recognize strong, worthy foes, even if they defeat said foes, and offer to recruit them), they will be exterminated… Why did those criteria sound like talking about almost every intelligence service to ever exist?

**Mastermind4892**, I may not have been totally disturbed when I last talked to you, but I am officially disturbed now that I have looked into the abyssal parts of the Internet… I do not understand how I have been able to sleep these past few days, so horrid was the mental imagery of the aforementioned essay, though it contained no photos (fortunately, or I would be honour bound to personally hunt down he who dared write it and murdered someone in such a manner, even if it was with consent) or illustrations. However, I have managed to (barely) save my sanity by reading a post from an actress who participated in such a photo shoot, with thumbnails showing herself being lined up with a machine that did most of the work, and supposedly the woman is still alive and well… I guess it is possible to survive a vaginal and a stomach puncture without extensive surgical repair? Well, when it comes time to kill some of the later characters, they sure aren't going to survive their roasting, and then we shall KILL THE COOKS! BURN THEM WITH FLAMETHROWERS FOR THEIR SINS! I'm a bit overzealous about hating on sentient-eaters, aren't I?

I should really go start on Chapter 4 now.

REVIEW!


	4. Die Another Day

A/N: I know my rant at the end of the last chapter was frightening. Hell, _I_ WAS DEEPLY frightened by the Internet… and how horrid the ends I now have planned for some people truly are. However, I am intrigued by the fact that you found that disturbing instead of the deaths of 1.3 million people in a single day, more if you count the Soviets cut down in that day of war by the assorted Allied armies. Stalin was right on one thing then: "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." However, I have now gotten over the shock of gazing into the depths of the abyss, so if in future lemons I go into a bit more of the senses of taste and smell instead of my old spirit, sight, touch, and hearing combination, don't be too surprised. Of course, no one will eat any parts of anyone else (except cum for obvious reasons), however don't expect a lack of slight creepiness in the commentary from our favourite pink physical form of congealed spirit copies.

**Lost guy on lost planet**, **Nenfaer** is talking about Red Alert ONE, not Three! In RA1, units did not retain any formation whatsoever and any real manoeuvring of an army had to be done manually in stages to keep any sort of unit cohesion. Note that the maser that is said to be used in ionizing air for Tesla tech would be a big power drain, and so would charging the coil itself. The tech is hardly practical, but I'm tweaking it so it actually works, instead of not working at all like it would in the real 50s!

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><p>Chapter 4: Die Another Day<p>

_August 1, 1957_

Soviet armoured columns were on the move, whole Tank Armies moving toward the Soviet-Polish border to take out the Allies near Warsaw. The Allies needed at least six more hours to organize for a general retreat, and at least two days to execute a general retreat through Poland. Their best bet was to have Tanya blow up bridges on the Soviet-Polish border so that they could get away before the Soviet armoured tide could arrive and wash over their outnumbered forces. Blowing the bridges would get the job done, making the Soviets detour one way or the other…

Tanya and her squad had a battalion again this time, but they were doing things the sneaky way, in that Tanya went ahead with her squad following behind her, and liberated an Allied POW processing facility. This added quite a few more fighters to their cause once the extra weapons stowed in the APCs were handed out to "arm the mob" so to speak. They navigated around a ridge and blew the Flame Turret guarding the entrance to a small soviet camp to dust just before a Scud missile rocked the ground and threw up dirt nearby, the launcher was soon detected atop a ridge near some oil barrels, and a ballistic arch of flamethrower fire from the T-1955s was sufficient to destroy it and the fuel barrels, before the squadron moved north to the four bridges in this immediate area, destroying the ones closest to the Soviet side first, allowing themselves to simply leave on the polish side. The river here was too deep for Soviet T-55s to wade safely, so the Reds would be unable to cross in this sector. To the north, they destroyed a small Soviet base guarding three more bridges before destroying all the bridges.

Now, if the Soviet forces wanted to cross with any reasonable time or efficiency, would need to detour far north or south along the border to get to the next clusters of bridges, as the river was too narrow for deployment of sub pens and therefore transports. It had basically been turned into a canal during the German occupation back in WWII, thin and deep. The Germans had built these bridges back in the day, clustered to funnel Soviet armoured forces in case the Comintern got any ideas. This was proving very useful now…

Unfortunately, that meant that while the Allies were retreating through the Sudeten Mountains, The Soviets were looping south through southern Poland to cut the rear echelons of the Allied formations off. Since Allied forces had been forcibly brought to battle over and over again since the Dresden Offensive halted at Warsaw, with their supply lines hard-pressed by the Soviet intrusions in Germany, they were at real risk of simply not having enough ammunition to fight the Soviets with full effectiveness.

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><p><em>August 3, 1957<em>

Allied divisions still in Germany were all bogged down battling the Soviets, and the Greece Line was similarly tied up, so Gunter von Esling was recorded to have facepalmed after looking at the strategic map and muttered something to the effect of "And this is why my old boss will stay in business for decades if not for posterity…" Then the Allied Supreme European Commander, looking at the Soviets moving toward the Sudeten Mountains, phoned a certain well-known old friend and his ex-boss. "Hey Hannah, Gunter here…"

"Is there something I can do for you today?"

"Yes…"

"Spill."

"Well, the Soviets have managed to defeat our forces in the region and are grinding across southern Poland to cut off the retreat of the main Allied armies in Poland. The Soviets have reinforced their Northern Germany units through the Baltic and they're pushing us hard in battle in and around Berlin. The Greek and Italian forces are tied up along the Balkans front, and will need to stay there to have even a chance of hanging on to the territory you've returned to us."

"You want me to make sure the main French and British armies make it out of Poland, and you can't pull another Dunkirk because the Soviets hold the Baltic, right?"

"That's basically the point. We need you to hold the same passes you secured before in the Sudeten Mountains so that our armies can retreat through them. We will be able to hold the Soviet Berlin Offensive with the forces we have, but we cannot possibly muster enough troops to hold that fort down. With your tanks dug in forming the main defences on the ground and our air support preventing the Soviets from attaining air superiority, we will be able to hold long enough to pull all the Allied units out of Poland to fight another day."

"You mean 'you will be able to hold long enough', right?" Hannah deadpanned.

Gunter sighed, his old boss had always liked bluntness, sometimes to the point of making things a bit awkward "…Uh, yes."

"Why do I get the impression that I'm always stuck with the hardest assignments?"

"Because you are. Which is because you have the hardest tanks other than these new Soviet prototypes we're hearing reports about, but that's beside the point." Gunter deadpanned right back at his ex-boss.

"Well, I'll get the job done, but you'd better have the Allies ready to pay for every soldier or piece of equipment ruined in this holding action."

Gunter frowned "When have I ever cheated you out of the money you deserve?"

Hannah shrugged to herself "You haven't, which is why we're still cooperating well on a regular basis to defeat the Soviet Union instead of launching separate initiatives."

"True, thanks for agreeing to help this time."

Hannah snorted in a very unladylike fashion "No problem, Gunter, for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!"

There was a moment of silence before "Hannah, please don't tell me that's your new slogan for this war?"

"So what if it is?"

"It sucks."

"Shut up, Gunter von Esling."

"Yes, ma'am, good luck, ma'am."

"Good luck to you too, Gunter, Shepard out."

"Jahowl, Von Esling out."

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><p><em>August 4-10, 1957<em>

"Well, we're here, now where are the Allied columns coming in and where are we expecting the Soviet push?" Hannah muttered as her units took up positions along the mountains, parking hull-down wherever possible and establishing dominating fields of fire throughout the now-unfrozen peaks. The Sudeten Mountains were also known as the Sudety or Sudetes Mountains, but that was rather irrelevant. Ranks upon ranks of T-1955 tanks etched terraced firing lines over the terrain, supported by numerous Camo Pillboxes that had been deployed to the field of battle by the MCVs running around. Artillery and rocket artillery was scattered all over the defence lines, but the day was spent by the gunners working out the math on their slide rules for various target areas. They had, after all, nothing better to do, and areas they hadn't calculated could be targeted by the intermediates of calculated areas, with minor adjustments as needed. Roving armoured elements would stop any flanking attempt or bog it down long enough for contingency plans to be put into motion. Tanks dug themselves in and took whatever anti-artillery precautions they could, namely sandbagging their tops over the slat armour to absorb artillery shell damage. Air support from the Aviation Brigades was restricted to utility choppers and Sabre air superiority fighters, which was why Hannah really hoped the Attack Helicopter and Arrow programs would bear fruit soon. The former was tentatively coded V-HA-1960 by serial number because it was expected to come in 1960 with the technical difficulties of building a powerful, durable, reasonably fast, extremely heavily armed, and—this was the kicker—INEXPENSIVE attack chopper. For obvious reasons, they would have to compromise, but Hannah found it just better to push the R&D squads as far as physically possible and then pushing them some more.

Sure, they'd managed to outfit the utility choppers they'd bought from other companies for heavy combat duty. They'd upgraded the things with bigger, stronger engines, some more armour, large pods of anti-tank rockets, and three guns, but their survivability was still questionable. The guns were a single 40mm auto-cannon mounted in a turret under the nose, controlled by the gunner, and two 12.5mm machine-guns also controlled by the gunner on the chopper's sides. These could be manned and detached from the gunner's control for side-firing weaponry if desired… since they could traverse between 0 degrees (full forward) and 120 degrees (30 degrees back) respectively in their mounts. That calibre was also a point of contention between SI and the Allies, the latter were sticking to the old 12.7mm calibre, while SI had always been and always would be metric. The calibres were very nearly interchangeable, an old 12.5mm barrel could in fact fire 12.7mm rounds without jamming after it was worn down enough, and a 12.7mm barrel could fire 12.5mm rounds with a reduction in accuracy. Still, so far only Germany, Spain and France, out of all the European powers, had made the switch to metric official. It was like the 7.92 vs. 7.62mm vs. 7.5mm clash that often made servicing the different guns in WWII difficult… at least the British and French had been mostly armed with SI stockpiles during THAT war.

The choppers engaged the enemy first, popping up from behind hills dozens of kilometres east of the main fortifications around the pass to rain anti-tank rockets and gunfire down on the advancing Soviet carpet of ground forces. The Soviets fired back using their own anti-tank rockets, and typically failed as the projectiles were unguided. The six infantry loaded up in each chopper went for the firing ports in the doors and used their battle rifles to spray down more bullets at the Soviets. Since the Aviation Brigades' soldiers had been specially trained for tracking and shooting at rapidly moving targets with their battle rifles on full auto (with bipods deployed), three out of five rockets that would have hit choppers despite evasive manoeuvres were shot down by the infantry, and the other two hit, taking two of the relatively fragile choppers down. The fire from the choppers became more indiscriminate, the troops hooking their safety harnesses to the ceiling holds of the choppers before opening the doors. They shouldered their rocket launchers, common to all Assault Infantry, which chopper-borne infantry were labelled as, aimed and fired in rippling volleys. The two middle men pulled the doors shut, the front ones grabbed their battle rifles again to fire from the firing ports once more, and the middle and back men began reloading the launchers.

That doctrine had been developed during testing of the ramshackle combat choppers, half a month prior, to improve firepower output in all regards. Soon the Soviets had brought up antiaircraft guns, four guns mounted on the back of a truck, and the choppers fled while the Soviet tanks below them, the surviving ones, milled about mindlessly. T-1955s joined the battle at that point, all 450 or so tanks of the Sixth Armoured Brigade, while the APCs of said Brigade pulled the crews of the eight downed choppers from the smoking aircraft hulks. Then they sprayed the things thoroughly with fire extinguishers and salvaged as much ammunition and hardware as they could while the tanks pushed the Soviet vanguard further back. The Soviets were in an essentially hopeless fight, as all their Scud and BM-21 launchers had been destroyed and their T-55 ranks had been severely thinned by the wave of choppers raining anti-tank rockets down on them. The infantry had also been badly shaken up by the rocket and bullet rain, and it was a question now of whether they feared the flamethrowers of the T-1955s (none were fitted with the 40mm gun for secondary unless without APC escort) or the severe discipline of the Red Army more.

The tactical analysis of the situation could be summed up rather simply, as it was in later textbooks on combined-arms warfare. The initial helicopter strike dealt severe damage to those elements of the Soviet formation effective against T-1955s and threw the enemy into disarray. The disrupted enemy formation, unable to hit back effectively, called for help, which resulted in a slight traffic jam as the tailing units were pulled up while the forward units were manoeuvring to evade fire. The helicopters pulled out of the area as soon as units able to reliably gun them down were nearing their effective range, and armoured elements waiting in ambush in the bowl-shaped valley waded into the disorganized enemy. Qualitative and newly established quantitative armoured superiority coupled with a ready supply of highly effective anti-infantry armaments (flamethrowers) were then able to annihilate the enemy vanguard units and rout what was left.

The Soviets were tense and on the lookout for the next two hours, advancing in condensed formations, all their units mixed together in the vanguard, and sweeping the terrain in front of them for mines and hidden vehicles. They found nothing, and after six hours of inching their way forward at walking speed, thirty kilometres after the location where their vanguard units had been annihilated, they started relaxing a bit. Two kilometres beyond that, they met a ragged Allied defence line that offered minimal and ineffectual resistance and was soon destroyed. They had no idea that the pillboxes had their machine-guns puppet-strung to fire once the Soviets tripped certain wires, and to sweep back and forth until their ammunition ran out or they were destroyed. They were also rigged to blow up if someone tried to enter a door or something, as the floors were mined. This fake line was eight kilometres east from the main SI defence lines…

The Soviets crested the mountains just east of the line of mountains the SI units were dug into. Like every other hill for the past three kilometres, there was a 200-meter firebreak of cleared land, cut out by tanks, one hundred meters up from the bottom of the valley on the west side. The Soviets ignored it, as nothing had happened so far despite the firebreaks… they advanced. The main Soviet units were crossing into the firebreak when everything went to hell. A sharp, shrill whistle, just like the previous firebreaks, rang out as soon as the first Soviet stepped foot onto the firebreak. Since the Soviet way of clearing minefields was to march a couple of brigades over one, the mines had not been activated in the previous firebreaks… until the Soviets were halfway through. Three redundant underground wire networks had been laid throughout the firebreaks, and every mine in the carpet that stretched across the firebreaks and the forests, since that was what they'd been doing in the time the choppers had bought for them. Every mine in the Sudeten Mountains Minefield activated at the same time, and quite a few went up, setting off other things ranging from tanks to trucks to men.

Allied columns retreating through the passes west of the defence line glanced east to see pillars of smoke rise into the air, then kept moving. Columns of vehicles bearing grimy-faced, battle-weary men on every surface they could hang onto rolled southwest toward Czech territory, those men unlucky enough to not get vehicles trudging alongside, some with bandages and all leaning on each other for support. They had been fighting endlessly for more than two weeks against Soviet counterattacks on the Allied forces in Poland after the Dresden Offensive. The food and water stations set up every ten kilometres by an SI Logistics Brigade were welcome, providing thousands of litres of boiled and thus cleaned (as much as feasible) water to thirsty soldiers and giving them places to rest and eat food. These were tired and often wounded troops, so they were not expected to handle marching through mountains as well as fresh troops were.

The Soviets in the meantime were chattering in confusion and took some time to decide to send mine-clearing units first. That confusion was enough time for choppers that had detoured to the back of the Soviet formation to pop up over the hills and fire large volleys of rockets at the Soviets before their AA gun trucks could do anything. Then they ducked beneath the hills again and detoured around the main Soviet offensive prongs to slip back to Allied lines unmolested by MiGs, which were being engaged by the Sabres far overhead. Interestingly, they reported none of the prototype super-heavy tanks in this assault, maybe they were still pretty far from being ready for deployment?

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><p>Archivists' Note: The reader should be aware that the west side of a valley is the east face of the line of mountains on that side of the valley.<p>

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><p>The Soviets decided to push forward, and they only realized that there was a line of dug-in tanks (and not another dirt-coloured firebreak as was the case on previous lines of hills' eastern faces) when the T-1955s opened fire at 700 meters range, spraying flamethrower fire into the forests ahead of them liberally. It had been a reasonably dry summer, and with all the hay that they'd bought up from surrounding farms that had been doused with cooking oil and spread over the forest floor under a small layer of leaf litter, it BURNED. The west side of the valley between the two firebreaks formed by the cleared turf in front of the SI tank line and the firebreak near the bottom of the valley turned into a bonfire in under a minute. The blaze terrified the Soviet units, and they routed in utter chaos, tanks and vehicles wheeling about to flee as infantry grabbed on to what vehicles they could. Those that didn't make it to the vehicles… to quote Hannah's speech on this occasion "Look at them, Stalin drove them into the flames, he forced our hand, and for his folly his countrymen are dying, remember them, remember every one of those men roasting alive down there, and remember it when we avenge them by disposing of the mad tyrant!"<p>

The fire was mainly a psychological weapon, and it was very effective, driving the Soviets back into the mines that littered the real firebreak and forest beyond, just before a line of flames erupted on the east side of that firebreak, thanks to incendiary bombs dropped en masse by a loaned B-52 from the US Air Force. The Sudeten mountains burned that day… Soviet units were trapped in the 200-meter firebreak or fled over the mountain line to the east toward safer grounds on the other side of the next firebreak. MANY men and vehicles were destroyed by the mines as they rushed through the forests in a blind panic. The firebreak that was in plain sight from the dug-in SI tank line became a butchering field as 110mm, 40mm and 12.5mm rounds pelted them, and the choppers killed anything left alive in the area that did not surrender. The next firebreak was similarly blown to pieces, but this one was by attack planes strafing it with rockets repeatedly.

The Soviets took a whole two days to regroup after their panicked rout, with the first day spent waiting for the fires to burn themselves out. It was late on August 7, after two Allied armies had already been pulled out through the pass moving men and materials day and night, when the Soviets pushed against the defence line again. This time, they came under constant coordinated artillery and rocket artillery fire as soon as they began moving, destroying most of the Soviets' own artillery units at long range before they could do much damage, or at least accurate damage. Long barrels really helped howitzer ranges… and smaller calibres meant that back when the old 100mm guns were designed in the mid-1930s it was actually feasible to make the barrels so long in calibres (larger calibres equal longer barrel equal more instability in barrel structure). Recent renovations had taken the A-WAG-100-55C to -65A in calibre length and hence started a new serial number in terms of lettering. Though the basic gun mechanism stayed the same, new techniques had made the gun about the same weight despite the longer barrel, and it was better at absorbing recoil now.

In fact, it was so improved, especially in recoil, that some suggested deploying it on aircraft, for now that idea isn't going to fly, since engineering a superior attack chopper was already hard enough. How the hell would they manage to fit enough artillery shells in the chopper to make the weapon worthwhile? Besides, it would be difficult to incorporate it into an attack aircraft unless they used at least a transport plane, or if it was a chopper, after years of technical experience with helicopter designs and tinkering with models. It would be too expensive to build too many full-sized prototypes to test the incorporation of an artillery gun.

For someone who produces such good results, SI is very stringent in its spending in R&D, offering hourly salaries about 75% as much as other factions for such research personnel. However it was also known for arranging extra contract work for its researchers, in addition to superiors (read: mostly Jane but sometimes her subordinates) that actually listen and understand. There were also good retirement benefits and the fact that if you wanted a new part, you could send the order over to the machining plant next door or sometimes literally in the next room and you'd have your part within hours, instead of the days that were the norm elsewhere. This pitched to the obsessive inventors, those most likely to produce results regularly and worked the hardest on any give project.

Finally, as a major measure to reduce resource wastage, personnel were often paid bonuses for the satisfactory and timely completion of a major project they were tasked to. Typically, how much they managed to impress Jane and assorted experts had a significant part in determining whether or not or how much they would get as a bonus. Of course, they didn't have to be flashy (barrel rolls were not expected of the attack chopper program by any means), if it was functional, reliable, and got the job done very well, then it was good and the team got some leeway with budget for the next project and maybe a bonus. If it could do more than its job, was completed before the due date and/or was significantly under budget, even better.

The Scud missiles, however, were still one type of long-range hitting capability SI did not (yet) possess. The Soviets had the missiles, and only those missiles, as their one big advantage in engagement range. Of course, it was nowhere near accurate (not even within a hundred meters) at longer ranges. Still, they were doing damage as the Soviets bombarded the SI tank line, with one real tank per 40 meters along the 50-kilometre defence line. Only 25% of the tanks had been committed to the line, as the others had been withdrawn overnight. The Soviets threw themselves down on the reverse slopes of the next mountain line and started a long-range bombardment to soften their foes up.

The SI units were under orders to hold fire, just like the dummies that took up every other space in the line—the vehicle line would seem to be every 20 meters or so to observers who actually could spot all the vehicles—were holding fire. The Soviets came to a very natural conclusion: They were facing a line of dummies which were supposed to slow them down and consume their ammo. So, they moved a few recon elements over the crest of the hills from their hull-down positions, after re-supplying their ammunition. No fire met them, they literally wandered up to the SI line and rapped on the vehicles. Since the real ones were also clad in a layer of plywood on top of their slat armour and had wooden sheaths fitted over their barrels, they were essentially indistinguishable form the mock-ups. The Soviets moved past the opposing ridge into the open after the recon groups reported back, and pretty soon they moved past the line of fakes. The Allies had frequently used fake buildings, vehicles and even soldiers (read: scarecrows) to fool the Soviets or delay them, so Soviet commanders were instructed (read: ordered) to not waste too much ammunition (not that they could really afford it with their taxed supply lines) or time on fakes after determining they were fake.

All fakes were made fake, but some are more fake than others…

The Soviets only figured that out much later, well after they advanced past the fakes into the next valley. There, they were constantly under fire from the second defence line, consisting of tanks and turret dug in hull-down or, for the turrets, their equivalent of hull defilade i.e. the concrete base and machinery block being buried up to the traversing parts of their turrets under a cover of wood, scrap metal, and a lot of dirt. The relentless pounding of 110mm guns ensured the Soviets were soon pinned down on the opposite ridge, still west of the first defence line's silent tanks and fake tanks. The gunnery duel continued while Sabres and MiGs wheeled across the sky overhead and lighter armoured vehicles fired at each other from both lines. Artillery pieces were also duking it out, firing at the opposite side's lines and moving around regularly to avoid counter-battery fire or at least the attempts at said type of fire. Scud missiles detonated every few minutes near the SI line, but their horrific accuracy made it pretty much a non-issue. Only a few turrets or tanks were destroyed, whereas the Soviets soon moved their artillery into the open, guarded by hordes of AA trucks, to bombard the SI lines full force. Of course, this was only once the Soviet tanks retreated from the wreckage-littered ridge, satisfied that a set-piece tank duel was a stupid idea.

Counter-battery fire took out most of the Soviet artillery, buying time while the tanks abandoned the line and the turret crews were evacuated. The Soviets coming up over the ridge again after the one-day-long bombardment found the enemy's second defence line devoid of any enemy forces… which made them advance with caution. Soon, it became apparent that the SI units had backed up by two whole valleys which the Soviets rolled into, concentrating their forces for another big attempt at breakthrough. Unfortunately for the Soviet vehicles milling about in the valleys and on the slopes of the ridges, they were hit first by a sustained offensive from the west. The Soviets had abandoned their own rudimentary fortifications to push west, which meant they were severely disadvantaged now that it was warfare out in the open, with neither side having fighter support available as or against close-support choppers.

The "fake" T-1955s had been left where they were as they had been dug in and were too time-consuming and annoying for the Soviets to move, mainly because they were spaced far enough apart for T-55s to drive between them 3 or 4 abreast with space to spare. Now that the main battlefront had moved a whole three valleys westward, they were basically left alone but for the constant stream of Soviet supply trucks moving through day and night. Two days after the Soviets passed them by, in the dead of night, they got the signal to move out. At night, with the quieter surroundings, sounds tended to carry a long way…

Especially if that sound was over 1200 high-powered diesel engines starting up at once. Despite the sound insulation on the inside of the engine compartment and the efficient burning (high air-to-fuel ratios) involved, about 1200 of those engines still added together to a lot of noise. Even though they were distributed over a 48 kilometre line, it was still rather noisy as they clawed their way out of their entrenchments and their guns bellowed furiously at any and all things Soviet that they could reach.

The armour regrouped into three main forces within 15 minutes, each 16 kilometre zone coalescing into most of an Armoured Brigade's tank complement. They arranged themselves hull-down on the ridge due west of them and sniped away at the Soviet AA guns in that valley (designated Valley 2 for the operation, with the order going from east to west). Then, the choppers came in for the kill, firing fusillades of heavy rockets and machine-gun/auto-cannon rounds. That tore up the Soviet armour in Valley 2 to a satisfactory degree, as over in Valley 3 to the west the Soviets had been engaged by another armoured spearhead and thus a path cleared for the choppers to head out.

Finally the tanks went over the top in three concentrated armoured fists that ploughed into the confused Soviets hard from the east side of Valley Two. In the end, two whole divisions' worth of Soviet troops surrendered once it became apparent that they were finished, hemmed in on all sides by SI armoured units and heavily-armed ex-utility helicopters, with air superiority still more or less in Allied hands… They were marched into captivity, and the defences reorganized. The seven SI divisions in Europe had sustained a whole 5% worth of casualties through the course of the operation, with a bit over 7000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action. Hannah estimated she could take up to 25% casualties before morale began to take damage, given their current kill-to-death ratio of 30 to 1, counting enemy POWs, or kill-to-casualty ratio of 20 to 1. An estimated 140,000 Soviet troops had been killed or captured over the days of constant combat.

August 10, 1957 was the end of the week that had begun with the Fourth, and it would see the last major clash in the Battle of the Sudeten Mountains. The exhausted Soviets were whipped forth by their political officers and NKVD overseers and attacked while the last of the Allied units in Poland were shuffling through the pass. The stationary defences had already been packed up and removed, so it came down to a simple clash of armour versus better armour. The SI units held against the initial Soviet swamping by using their flamethrowers on infantry and their main guns against tanks, while the APCs took down lighter armoured units. The choppers were nowhere to be seen as the Soviets had AA trucks, but fighters still chased each other through the sky…

The Soviets were pushed all the way to Valley -2 (3 valleys eastward from the first defence line, which was in Valley 1) by armoured leapfrogging tactics before the notice came that all Allied forces in Poland had successfully, with Twelfth Field Division taking on rear-guard duty, retreated through the Sudeten Mountains. However, the outlook was still bleak as news had come a few days ago of the Soviets invading Turkey. If Istanbul fell, if the Soviets gained access to the western coast of Turkey, the results could be disastrous for the Middle East Theatre as most of the supplies came through the Mediterranean. The last resort would be to feed that entire theatre with the three port complexes SI held on the Red Sea, specifically the strait on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, with three cities at its tip and therefore three port complexes. They used to belong to Egypt, Palestine and Jordan respectively, but after the First War of Palestine possession had been transferred to Palestine. Notably, Jordan was still welcome to use the port that used to be its only link to the sea, and didn't have to pay as much tax as the other international users as a gesture of goodwill, but that was beside the point. If the Middle East Theatre, including the Egyptian Front, the Arab Front, and now the Caucasus Front, had to be fed by those three ports, things could get difficult.

The Turkish Army was fighting as hard as it could, but it didn't seem likely to be enough as Soviet armour advanced through the Caucasus and the more important western coast of Turkey, also invading the country by amphibious assaults across the Black Sea. A simultaneous Soviet assault on Greece had prevented the Allies from sending any troops to help, and Hannah had been thoroughly tied up pulling off screening duty for an overland Dunkirk in the Sudeten Mountains… She realized, thinking back on it all, that it was a Soviet back-up strategic plan in case they couldn't destroy the Allied armies in Poland. They were a lot smarter than they seemed, if not tactically then at least strategically, because they'd managed to distract her army long enough to allow for the report Hannah late in the evening of the 10th to be the worst thing possible short of the Soviets developing nuclear capability: Istanbul was under siege and the west coast of Turkey had fallen.

By the next morning, Soviet attack submarines were entering the Mediterranean, assembled from their Sub Pens, and began wrestling control of the sea form the Allies by sheer numbers and the mining of the straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal by secret mine-layers. These mine-layers had all been privately owned ships, owned by Soviet spies and sympathizers, and managed to block off reinforcements from the Mediterranean in short order. The Turkish Army, fighting pitched defence after pitched defence, was being ground back centimetre by centimetre. Settlement after settlement was burned to the ground for aiding the resistance, but still they fought on, even as their homeland sank beneath the Soviet yoke. Turkey was, like Sweden, being raped, shot, bayoneted, burned, and butchered for sport by NKVD and some Red Army units as the country slowly crumbled. There was only one major strategic option left for the Turkish Army as it was not technically a member of the Allies: Invade Iraq, which had been Soviet-sympathetic for quite some time and thus had a _casus belli_ on-hand for the Turks to use.

Hannah was increasingly alarmed by the situation in the Middle East, and could not pull her units from Algeria in case Libya did something stupid, with or without Soviet support. She also needed to keep the western Mediterranean—the area defined by the Sardinian Chokepoint as she called it (defined by Sardinia and Corsica, with a line north and south from those islands)—under a semblance of Allied control. That required maintaining naval bases in Algeria, which required holding the country firm. Taking Libya from Algeria would be a bad idea, as it would expose a not-so-defensible coastline for Soviet invasion, and need Fifth Division to do more running around to react to any threat. Strategically, she could not afford to move her seven divisions from the Central European operational area (Germany, Austria, etc.) in the face of the looming Soviet offensive.

Fortunately, Thirteenth Division, made of recruits from Palestine, had recently been activated for duty, and would reinforce the Palestinian forces in two weeks' time via the Cape route. She was willing to risk supply runs through the Med, but not the lives of her men and women, which was one of the things that brought her great loyalty from them (another thing was good pay and an absurdly high kill-to-death ratio). Hopefully they would be able to hold the line in the Middle East, and, if needed, turn Egypt into a piece of scorched earth should Nasser do something funny. As a last resort, they could probably pull off a fighting retreat across Egypt and Libya all the way to Algeria, should all be lost in the Middle East. The best thing was the one great firepower advantage SI-built tanks had, which was their relatively high mobile accuracy, so they could _really_ do an actual fighting retreat. It was still significantly lower than stationary accuracy, but was far superior to any and all contemporaries known so far.

By August 14, reports came of the Soviets establishing bases in the Dodecanese Islands despite her best attempts to dislodge them by carpets of naval shells and Allied bases in the area. The Mediterranean was slowly becoming more and more dangerous for Allied warships as Soviet subs engaged them in massive numbers. Greece was doomed and she was almost as helpless as the rest of the Allies. However, Stavros eventually insisted on seeing his homeland and village during the invasion, so she sent her cousin Tanya along to essentially baby-sit him.

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><p><em>Greece, August 25, 1957<em>

"My God… what have they done?" Stavros whispered, looking around a corner. They had decided to travel light for this mission, as bringing over a large armoured contingent would be too noticeable and the Soviet numerical superiority was such that they didn't have a chance. The Greece Line had withstood the Soviet siege for months, but running low on men, materials, morale and everything else, it had crumbled once the Soviets launched a series of amphibious attacks along the southern coast of Greece. They had been based off the Dodecanese with subs and MiGs running interference against Crete, after capturing an Allied Radar Dome and taping into allied communications to determine the best timing for such a surprise attack.

Though the Greece Line had been supplied as best as possible by Allied convoys fighting their way through the Mediterranean from Algeria and France, it still wasn't enough to hold the Soviet war machine at bay. After the Adriatic east coast was lost, Italy's ports became blockaded by Soviet subs and so were essentially useless. Even SI-designed freighters (and the other Allies' rip-offs of the durable, reliable design) could not hope to penetrate the screen of subs in the Adriatic. With the Soviet hold on the Dodecanese, Palestine could no longer send supplies to Greece, and so the front had eventually fallen, though the Greeks and other assorted Balkans armies fought the Soviets to the last bullet, they were still crushed under the treads of twin-barrelled Soviet T-55s making their way south. Delaying actions and guerrilla warfare in the mountains of Greece would continue, the once-warring factions of the country uniting as their homeland was raped and pillaged by the Soviets.

Indeed it had been raped and pillaged, since even out in the streets of what used to be Stavros' home village there were corpses of women with their legs splayed open and their clothes torn off. Quite a few had the NKVD logo stamped into their skin as a terror tactic, but the majority did not, and from the Red Army troops kicking down a door across the road and the screaming that ensued moments later, the Red Army had done most of the damage. Burning, half-collapsed buildings and rubble stood and/or laid everywhere, much of the dirt stained with blood. Soviet and Allied corpses or pieces thereof littered the ground. Tanya's troops took up positions at a signal from her, with a few brief gunshots mingling with the machine-gun fire and the screaming that still rang in the distance, though the latter was often soon silenced. The occasional boom of cannon or rocket fire echoed through the once-peaceful valley…

The screaming inside the cozy-looking home was muffled occasionally over the next minutes while the Allied troops waited for their prey. The noise finally died down abruptly into the gurgle of someone choking and drowning in their own bodily fluids. Tanya recognized the sound, since she had inflicted it on some Wehrmacht (yes, unusual, but madmen can be anywhere…) prisoners back in the Second World War when she caught them cutting strips off a captured French Resistance woman with shaving razors for sport, while infiltrating a German base in prelude to an attack. She'd subdued the men quickly with a shot to the crotch for each of them (the room was soundproofed for torture), then had them tied up by her men. After the battle, she had come back to stick her Battle Rifle's bayonet into them. She'd angled her thrusts up from the base of the sternum but aimed somewhat to their right, her left, to miss their hearts. Then she'd sliced them open from sternum to crotch, their organs spilling out onto the cold stone floor, and left them to die before handing the bodies over to the disposal squads. They got what they deserved, since Tanya had to put their poor victim out of her misery by a bullet to the head that the half-shredded woman had begged Tanya for, and she had lost no sleep over it.

She did however have a feeling that the strangled gurgling, the same as those men had made in their death throes, that she was hearing now even from this distance (well, to be fair, she was only a few walls over by then) was going to embed itself in her memory for a while to come. The Red Army men came out of the house, chatting and laughing and with one still busy zipping up his pants. After a few seconds of the men standing outside on the porch, the same number as had entered earlier, they began to leave, and Tanya opened up from rather behind them at the corner of the house with her Battle Rifle set on full auto, sweeping them down in one burst and shooting each in the head again to make sure they were dead. The sudden silence allowed her to hear the distinctive click of a grenade pin being pulled and she back-pedalled immediately, though a twinkle in the distance from one of her men resulted in a dull thud inside the house as the would-be grenadier dropped dead.

She still threw herself flat in the back-yard she'd made it to (flipping over a fence en route) just in case. However, she kept her head up long enough to scan the area for threats before going face down as the grenade went off inside the house, blowing out the back windows and showering her in broken glass before she got up and checked the house for threats. Finally she shook herself off and entered the house through the broken back door. Other than the remains of two children and their mother, she found nothing of use, nothing of value was left, the house having been ransacked by the Reds. There was no time to do much for the bodies either except close their eyes. "Does that answer your question as to what's happening to your homeland, Stavros?"

The general looked around and nodded slowly "Yes, unfortunately, it does."

"Good, we need to move on out, get to the evac point…" Tanya took point as her squad and Stavros snuck through the ruins of the village, going through the smaller streets instead of the main road. Somewhere ahead, a tank's guns boomed one after another and the explosions of the rounds shook the ground as more screams rang out. Then there was maniacal laughter from soldiers gunning down fleeing civilians. A cloud of dust rose up ahead as a church spire toppled. Tanya's squad and Stavros followed a fleeing civilian through a goat trail through the hills near town as the Soviet tank's rumbling engine passed somewhere behind them, firing on more houses to flush out targets for the soldiers to practice on. More gunfire and screams rang loud and clear behind them as the small group fled, as far as Tanya's operation was concerned, Stavros was infinitely more important than these civilians

The Allied outpost at the evac point soon came into sight, but a squad of MiGs flying overhead blew the evac choppers apart on the ground "Damn it, Plan B, Plan B!" Tanya shouted into her radio before leading the group west, escorted by a handful of Allied Medium Tanks, mostly M48s and Centurions. These were expended in relatively short order battering through Soviet squads as they moved southwest, wading across a river, and then moved north to the secondary evacuation point, swimming again after they'd drowned two Soviet tanks guarding a bridge by Tanya sneaking by and planting charges on the bridge's supports. By the end of the excursion, everyone was thoroughly sodden and very annoyed. Stavros was pained personally to see his homeland so ravaged, pillars of smoke rising everywhere and fires dotting the landscape. Tanya and her soldiers were more annoyed by the water in their uniforms than anything else, but everyone knew that when the USSR was finally defeated, there would be a reckoning. The entire Soviet unit here, identified by the Soviet dog tags Tanya had taken from Soviet corpses, would be put on trial for war crimes…

Those trials would end pretty ugly. Stalin would end pretty ugly, as for Nadia, who had authorized most of the war crimes, well, that would end even uglier.

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><p>AN: I can see SI's future encounters with fetish websites, especially ones about cannibalism, especially the very IDEA of "consensual" (brainwashed) cannibalism: Internet censoring and Silencer Squads. And when the reports on Batarians eating people come around… "War comes BEFORE peace." (Quoted from Peacebringer, a heavy tank from the video game Universe At War: Earth Assault)

You know, if S058 hadn't quite reading this series, he'd eventually be around to see the Great Rout At Moscow. **However, if this SOPA/PIPA bullshit passes, we won't be able to even talk about politicians online (like how negative movie or book reviews will never get published), let alone write fanfiction. The companies are too lazy to protect themselves, so they're hiring the US government to do it for them. DOWN WITH SOPA/PIPA! Oh, and about intellectual property, I have a pirated version of Forged Alliance for one reason and one reason only: It was no longer in stores as of summer 2010. I went to a lot of stores, searched far and wide, and I couldn't find it. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO IF I WANTED TO PLAY THE GAME?**

The US government is threatening to trade-blacklist Spain if Spain does not submit to a bill which has yet to be made into law in the US. Well Hallelujah the global policeman finally tried to turn the world into one big police state. DO NOT BOW DOWN TO IT.

REVIEW! AND TALK TO YOUR SENATOR AND HOUSE REPRESENTATIVE ABOUT STOPPING SOPA!


	5. Things Go South, Among Other Directions

A/N: **Long AN here, you may want to skip. Sorry I took so long, but I was fighting on the correct side of the War On Freedom (waged by Mega-corporations against the Free World).**

I figured out that SOPA, PIPA, and HR 1981 (i.e. The Big Brother Act) are all cover-ups, distractions for the ACTA juggernaut, though HR 1981's name is a trap so that no Congressman can oppose it. ACTA is GLOBAL, not just the US, and must be resisted, fanfiction and fan art must endure. Check out my "Guide to the Resistance" on DeviantArt for details, thank you. Also see **Internet At War Wiki**. I took so long on this chapter because I went to compile that for some time. As a final word, beware TPP, the next wave in the assaults on life, liberty, love and the pursuit (NOT PURCHASE) of happiness everywhere.

Well, fanfiction must go on, even if it will soon be unavailable and I'll get garrotted for millions of dollars for writing fanfiction by the big media lobbyist (read: politician bribing) groups. Did you know that they threatened Obama with cutting their bribes if he didn't stop opposing SOPA? That is extortion plain and simple… I SO cannot wait for the events of Yuri's Revenge where we need to grind it out against hordes of mind-controlled slaves (and conveniently massacre a lot of them).

Incidentally, did you know that Hannah Shepard had Hans Spemann assassinated for his murder of his graduate student Hilde Mangold, whose dissertation won Spemann his Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1935? Remind me to unveil the operation in the late 80s or early 90s as part of the "*Insert Year Here* Truth Commission" which released general reports on SI Spec Ops and some select Black Ops of the late 1930s.

Also, tier56's review on SupCom: ME was the only accurate one I've seen so far. It's true that I so ABSURDLY underpowered all the units in SupCom. According to map sizes and such, most fliers are from 300 to 500 meters above the ground (in-game, in reality they'd be much higher up), yet they take 4 or 5 seconds or less to fall to the ground. That means about 7 Earth gravities are applied. Also, why we don't have massive space-based factory and Paragon compounds: No one wants the military to get too powerful (but it has to stay powerful enough to match evenly with the other Coalition factions), and quantum wakes put a bit of a limit on the density and number of large units i.e. warships jumping at once. Speeds are limited by what stealth systems can hide, hence in space the units are hideously fast but in atmosphere not so much, even the extra fuel-burning systems, misnomers though they may be, can only hide the passage of the craft at limited speeds. The same is true of jumping onto a planet, even overlapping stealth fields can only hide the atmospheric ripples of so many units, hence jumps into atmosphere are restricted to Command Units. As for the absence of ground-side fortress worlds (totally covered by weaponry), all factions are again worried about too much militant power.

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><p>Chapter 5: Things Go South (Among Other Directions)<p>

_Middle East Theatre, September 1957_

The SI (and now Allied since it was eminently practical) Middle East Theatre ranged east-west from the western border of Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean (the area east of a line south from Greece's southern mainland tip) to the Indian border in the east. North-south, it extended from the Black Sea/Afghanistan to the southern border of Egypt, ran along the middle of the Red Sea, and included a 200-km wide strip of the Indian Ocean along all the way to the line south from the Pakistan-India border. These were fuzzy boundaries, and units could chase enemies across them without needing to turn back (unless the country they were entering protested), but the system was functional and reasonably sized, like the European theatre was. The Middle East Theatre was headquartered in the State of Palestine. They were going to get some bad news…

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><p>Archivists' Note: SI's Theatre divisions have shifted over time, but in WWIII the land forces' theatres were as follows:<p>

Middle East: Discussed Above

Europe: Rather obvious, but notably includes everything west of Kiev, north of the midline of the Mediterranean, east of the mid-line of the Atlantic, the border moving around Iceland and including Scandinavia and the islands north of it.

Far East: Includes China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and all of the USSR defined by a line due north from the westernmost point of Mongolian territory. HQ in Japan as of WWIII.

Southeast Asia: Includes India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, the South China Sea, Indonesia… anything north of Australia that does not extend beyond a north-south line defined by the easternmost coastal point of mainland Australia. Currently no HQ, mainland portion administered by a department of Far East Theatre, as SI has no holdings in this area, and islands administered by South Pacific Theatre.

South Pacific Theatre: Australia, New Zealand, and those Polynesian islands and other islands east of them. HQ in New Caledonia (not a client state, direct SI-held territory, runs by the SI Constitution, mostly administered by locally elected parliament, though the size is more like a council).

North Pacific Theatre: All of the North Pacific not covered by the Far East Theatre or North American Theatre, extends across equator to a degree with the Marianas and Gilberts. HQ in Vancouver.

North American Theatre: The largest theatre, covers all of Canada, Greenland, and the continental US (including Alaskan islands). Note that St. Pierre and Miquelon are also included. HQ in Toronto's outskirts on a vast plot of land bought on sale and used to build up an industrial/military/recycling compound. This theatre is spearheading the recycling of tin cans and recovery of raw resources. Though it is expensive, it could save one's ass in the case of a main trade embargo. As of now (WWIII) it is popularly known as the Americas Theatre.

Central American Theatre: Mexico, what is usually called Central America by others, and the Caribbean islands, ALL of them, and extends west from the mid-Atlantic line (later defined by the Ridge). Currently no HQ exists and it is administered by a department of the North American Theatre. This is because SI does not possess any holdings in this region as of 1957.

South America: Self-explanatory, also includes Easter Island, Christmas Island, the Galapagos, and the islands west of the Mid-Atlantic line. Currently no HQ, administered by department of North American Theatre.

Note that much of Russia is not currently covered by a Theatre, whichever Theatre's forces conduct operations there get responsibility for managing their own forces in the region.

Oceanic Theatres are divided as follows: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian. The Oceanic Theatres are typically responsible for keeping the transportation lines open throughout the world, hunting down hostile fleets, and actually running the delivery contracts and such. They are also known for environmental surveys and raising awareness on certain issues. For example, some of the events seen later in this series are the results of peacekeeping and environmentalist operations.

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><p><em>Eastern Mediterranean, Under jurisdiction of Middle East Theatre, September 5, 1957<em>

The recently-independent island nation of Cyprus had declared itself neutral in this war, but that didn't stop the Soviet Union from landing an amphibious assault force on its borders one day in early September 1957, right after the island refused an offer of evacuation from SI warships. Within moments after the first troop transports charged the beaches, government buildings were hit by MiG air strikes before they could get more than half a message off to Palestine.

The Atlantic Fifth Supply Flotilla had gotten the alarm from the island and a confirmation from SI Middle East Theatre HQ moments before the MiGs came for them in strafing runs of rockets. Their missiles (the Destroyers had been refitted with the first model of the missiles) and guns were already swinging over as radar started showing contacts coming in. The MiGs were flying low, but not low enough to be lost in the sea wash that the computers automatically filtered out.

40mm auto-cannons began pounding out a steady rhythm of proximity-charge fire at the inbound targets as fast as they could, sending out four shots per second from the belt feeds. The guns had always been adapted to belt-feed in shipboard guns for sustained fire capability, and were mounted in relatively small double-gun turrets. They were known to be effective against fighters so long as they scored a hit, any hit, or detonated close with the main shrapnel cone forward intersecting with the plane.

Quite a few MiGs were taken down, but the rest fired their rockets at the wildly manoeuvring warships. Many of these big rockets struck home, blowing holes in the superstructures and craters in the armour of Frigates and Destroyers. The rockets weren't nearly as advanced as later anti-ship missiles would be, and citadel armour of the ships was extremely thick for their classes, even factoring in the cruiser and heavy cruiser classifications other factions stuck them with. All the armour of the ships had also been upgraded to composite plating, though the relatively thin composite plates on the superstructure could only hold off most artillery shells up to 6-inch or so in calibre by the outer ring of compartments serving as a stand-off space. The citadel plating thickness had remained essentially constant (materials changed) while armour elsewhere had increased, the ceramics' lower density allowing better protection, in the form of much more armour being packed onto the hulls…

Corvettes, despite being refitted with thicker armour, especially in the compartment walls and decks, since the most external armour they could afford to put on still wouldn't have been quite enough, did not do nearly as well. One was snapped in half in the first rocket run by five rockets and the halves drifted apart as the rear propellers chugged in opposite directions with the different sides to turn around and make sure it didn't crash into the slowly settling bow. The water-proofing had held up, at least held up well enough that the stern was still mobile and the bow section, two of the watertight compartments still fully intact, only tipped back somewhat before it stopped settling. The surviving crew, doing their best to keep fires under control and keep the guns firing, including the main 100mm guns firing proximity-detonation fragmentation flak shells, could only watch more or less helplessly as the MiGs came around for another run on the fleet.

Three other corvettes had also been holed and were taking on some water, listing slightly and burning as they zigzagged in the waters, guns throwing up as much flak as they could toward the MiGs. This Supply Flotilla had not been wholly refitted with the relatively new mid-range anti-aircraft missiles yet since the land troops and Fleets (units with Carriers) got priority and there was only so much budget available for this given the amount that was being poured into new T-1955s for all the land units. That was a costly mistake as one of the Corvettes blew up after a direct hit on the forward magazine by two consecutive rockets, punching through the two layers of armour in the hull and penetrating the magazine. The little ship's bow immediately began to settle as it manoeuvred for all it was worth with its rudders, as its propulsion system was yet undamaged. What immediately became obvious was that due to the exceedingly sturdy construction of the hull and bulkheads the magazine blast, despite ripping a hole through the keel and a hole in both sides of the ship, still did not quite sever the quickly filling bow section of the ship.

The anti-flash mechanism of the dual 100mm gun turret had worked in reverse too, so it was not totally wrecked and could still fire after a fashion when ammunition was brought by trolleys form the rear magazine. However the turret was now thoroughly jammed as its traversing machinery was shredded by the explosion, and the ship was slowing down as it took in water. The forward two watertight sections being breached meant that it would be slowed down, have a harder time manoeuvring, and need serious dry-dock repairs, but it wouldn't sink, not yet.

The big difference between a Corvette's forward magazine and a Frigate's was the fact that the Frigate stored 200mm shells instead of 100mm shells, hence the explosion that came when a Frigate had taken too much fire tore the bow away and mangled the bulkhead immediately aft of the magazine. Even with bilge pumps working at full capacity, the water pouring in through several holes rent in its side plus the damage forward meant the ship had listed over to 15 degrees and was responding sluggishly despite the large and numerous rudders and engine output still being sustained.

SI-built Freighters, when empty, had several things going for them in combat: lots of watertight compartments, honeycombed construction of said compartments, lots of counter-flooding capacity without risking sinking, extreme engine power in proportion to their weight, and enough rudders to manoeuvre more nimbly than Destroyers. However, they were somewhat lacking in terms of raw armour, gun power or gun numbers, despite having a pair of torpedo tubes, which in this case was utterly useless. Their skirt armour was proved effective against rockets coming in from the side while it was held up out of the water on its usual carrying rails, but that was a bit beside the point.

The MiGs eventually began running out of ammunition and turned for home, and the Atlantic Fifth Supply Flotilla steamed southeast toward Palestine's coast to drop off the worse-off ships. The ships that had been hit in the stern with propulsion damaged or partly destroyed were taken under tow or partial tow by heavier ships, with damage control crews transferred over to those damaged warships still under way to help contain the fires and such. The total came to one corvette sunk, three badly damaged, and two lightly damaged, two frigates with severe damage and one lightly maimed. The two Destroyers of the Flotilla had both taken moderate damage that looked worse than it was, as their superstructures were heavily pitted and scarred, but few crewmen/women had been killed and most of the systems were still functioning acceptably. As for the freighters, two were riding low in the water from flooding but were stable, and most of the others had taken damage only to their superstructures and armour.

In total, about 200 SI troops had been killed or wounded in the attack, not a bad ratio given the number of MiGs downed was estimated at around 40, and it was well-known that MiGs were expensive and complex to manufacture. The MiG-15 Fagot was one of the few things that the Soviets had a hard time mass-producing, mostly because of Stalin's ridiculous Purge getting rid of the ones intelligent enough to speed up the process. However, this was still classed as a strategic and tactical draw as SI doctrine was against battles of attrition. Both sides had only managed half their strategic objectives, the Soviets getting Cyprus but not eviscerating the Flotilla, and SI losing the chance to evacuate the island but keeping the Flotilla mostly intact and in fighting condition.

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><p><em>Iraq, Middle East Theatre, September 5-25, 1957<em>

The Turkish Army, after invading and taking Iraq in a rapid assault, fortified the northern border of the country with as much material as they could scrounge up one way or another, in preparation for further Soviet assaults. It wasn't quite enough as the Red Army attacked. Over eleven days, waves upon waves of infantry and tanks were broken upon the defence lines, aircraft roared through the skies overhead, and the fortifications were reduced to a sea of artillery craters. Still the Turks fought on, just like many kilometres to their west the entire Syrian border line was a sea of fire under heavy and sustained attack. In the first three days the Soviets had targeted Palestine directly, understandable as most of the SI forces in-theatre were concentrated in Syrian territory.

The greatest failure of Soviet strategists was their under-appreciation of just what hardware the Self-Defence Forces of SI Client States were allowed, or how much hardware… There was also the traditional Russian failure to understand what naval power offered, simply because the country was so huge in land area. It was like their failure at Tsushima to appreciate the fact that barnacles had a big effect on ship hulls and speeds after long cruises, like the cruise the Russian fleet did to get to Tsushima. The result here was that the Red Army's enemy had a number of relatively long-ranged, large-calibre artillery pieces (plus MANY smaller guns) at their disposal, decent ground forces, and the most lethal factor: good coordination. They also had enough planes to at least deny the Soviets air superiority so that the Soviets couldn't eliminate the (mostly water-borne) mobile artillery units on the SI and Palestinian SDF side.

The improvised "Monitors" providing most of the smaller-calibre artillery support were basically freighters with the top deck filled by ranks of 100mm light howitzers. Research had recently begun for 150mm howitzer technology, but that would take some time to produce something actually satisfactory. The Arrow program hadn't come to fruition yet, so they were still relying on Sabre jets produced under license from the Americans, which was a huge embarrassment. However, the V-HA-1957 was currently rated as the premier assault chopper of the world, despite being a ramshackle design created essentially in the field and based on the workhorse V-HT-1956 transport chopper.

Needless to say, with some T-1945s and stationary fortifications of the Palestinian SDF on the ground holding the line, Sabre jets in the air denying the Soviets air superiority, warship and artillery for counter-battery and bombardment, the attack on Palestine didn't go well. Hence the Red Army turned east to Syria. For once, they were correct in their thinking, as they thought that SI would not build as much in fortifications in its occupied territories. On the other hand, that meant they had to contend with lines and roving bands of T-1955s wreaking absolute havoc. Attack helicopters were also taking advantage of dunes and craters to pop up and rain down anti-tank rockets whenever they could. Sure, the things weren't all that accurate, but if they're being rained down in hexagonally-packed sets of 16 (two-layered hexagon, with the center through one vertex removed, that's 6+12-2=16 rockets), then they still packed a massive amount of damage to Soviet units unfortunate enough to be caught in the spray of rockets.

The final result was that on the nineteenth day of the Soviet offensive, after suffering 30% casualties, 6000 soldiers killed or wounded out of 20,000 total forces (16,000 front-line troops), Fourth Field Division was forced to retreat from the Syrian borders. They had lost a quarter of their 700-some tanks, though as many parts as were still useable had been stripped from the hulls and could probably be used to reassemble about 40 vehicles in the War Factories deployed in Palestine. The Turkish Army units had crumbled all the way to Baghdad on September 23, after sustaining upward of 80% killed, wounded or missing during running battles with the Soviets and numerous stands and ambushes. The 200,000 Turks lost had been traded for about 150,000 Soviets, due to Soviet armoured superiority, but the SI ratio was estimated at 6000 to 60,000.

Later, it was revealed that both Allied armies had done better than estimated, the Turks had in fact only lost 170,000 soldiers (stragglers lost during the retreat eventually regrouped) and cost the Soviets 250,000 men. SI had achieved 70,000 kills against the Red Army, plus nearly that number of wounded. Popular consensus put Soviet tactical inflexibility and political commissars as the causes of these numbers. Still, the Soviets had managed to overwhelm both Allied armies, and the Turkish units were in a shambles. The SI troops, who were now sorely under strength as they retreated through Syria, fighting for every inch to buy more time for those civilians who were willing to leave, had also taken a beating.

Third Armoured Brigade, transferred from 3rd Field Division, reached and helped stabilize the front in Syria on September 24, 1957, adding about 450 tanks to the arsenal at the disposal of Fourth Field Division. The unit had just received T-1955s and were now joining the battle at full efficiency. They had to hold for at least one more day to evacuate everyone who was willing to leave Syria and go to "a better life" as the advertisement posters said.

September 25, 1957 was, to many, the longest day in the history of the Middle East. The Soviets had rallied no fewer than three full Tank Armies and two standard Armies for a final push on Syria, aiming to sweep through to Palestine and thus eliminate the thorn in its side in the Middle East. On the outset of the attack, in the first hours of dawn, through the twilight came a sea of dark, rumbling shapes, advancing as a swarm of army ants would advance, rolling forward across the entire front of the SI defence line. Scud missiles, rocket artillery, and howitzers thundered at each other as the MiGs and Sabres drew first blood in the skies above. The most recent ammunition deliveries had just arrived, and the trucks carrying dead and wounded back to Palestine's ports would also ferry some of the last groups of civilian refugees back to the same ports.

The numerical ratio was daunting: 16,000 professional SI soldiers, 2000-some of which were still recovering from wounds, plus 40,000 well-trained Palestinian SDF men and women and 50,000 irregulars and militiamen, matched up against 600,000 enemy conscripts. In armour, the match was 950 T-1955s plus about 800 T-1945Ds versus 2400 Soviet tanks (1800 of which were from the Tank Armies). The PSDF had adopted similar organization to SI units, but with just over half as many tanks per division as they were mainly a defensive force instead of shock troops. Fortunately for the defenders, the armour ratio was not nearly as daunting as the soldier count ratio, and so the defenders knew, and knew well, that they had hope. There was, however, no chance of additional reinforcements, for in Europe the situation was at best terrible.

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><p><em>European Theatre, September 1957<em>

The Oder River Line had been shattered by seventeen Soviet Armies thrown against it at once on the 7th of September, and the war had burnt its way across Germany in the following two weeks. SI troops, all 7 Field Divisions in Europe, were being committed to battle up to twice per day until Hannah had been forced to pull them off the line every few days to conserve fighting capability for surgical stabs at the Soviets whenever possible. There were MANY possibilities, and though the Allies lost upward of 400,000 soldiers in the fierce fighting that raged across Germany, The Czech Republic, and Austria, the Soviets lost close to three times that many.

SI troops fought at Rostock, at Kiel, at Hamburg, at Bremerhaven, and further west, being pushed back step by step despite tactical victory after tactical victory. Finally, tasked with holding the North German Plain for Allied troops to flee through before the Soviets could swarm and destroy them, Shepard Industries (now more often known as the Shepard Independents) suffered for its first time upward of 40% casualties to a force larger than a division. By the time they had finished the fighting retreat into France, only 80,000 of the 140,000 men and women of the seven divisions were still relatively uninjured and alive. 10,000 more had recovered enough from their injuries to be in passable fighting condition. Another 5,000 were fighting for their lives in Allied hospitals in France. About that many more were unaccounted for, their bodies never recovered, and as for the last 40,000 soldiers, they would never fight again, _for anything_.

As far as Shepard was concerned, despite a kill-to-_casualty_ ratio estimated around 7 or 8 to 1 and a KTD (kill to death) ratio of about half again that much (10.5 or 12 to 1), it was a crushing defeat given the proportion of forces she'd lost. She sold it to her troops as a draw and hoped there would be a brief respite where she could draw up reinforcements from the reserve troops she had available i.e. the Canadian Army proper. In the meantime, she considered consolidating the seven divisions into five, to bring them back toward full strength, but decided against it. To do so would not be good, it wasn't good for morale in World War Two when she had to dissolve and later re-commission a Field Division after the Battle of the Ossuary. To do it for two divisions while about another division's worth had been or were wounded or missing would be quite bad for morale. Her troops would likely be okay with it, it was the other Allied armies she was worried about, tired and low in spirits from losing Germany and parts of the Benelux.

She hoped that the Canadian Army troops would be quickly released, since the re-training regimen was one month long and the shipping one week. Fortunately, the fact that SI had become an integral if not central part of Canadian national identity, having everything from the most effective strike force to the best military technologies to the best human rights meant that reinforcements would come soon. They would be formally discharged honourably from the Canadian Army and be sent to the training camps immediately, Jane would make sure of that. In the meantime, the situation in the Middle East continued to deteriorate, she hoped they could hold…

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><p><em>Middle East Theatre, September 25, 1957<em>

The cloud of dust stirred up by the tide of hostile armour to the east of the Golan Heights was visible even now. Palestine had evacuated much of its northern reaches, including Beirut and essentially everything north of the Golan, to retreat to more defensible territory considering no reinforcements were coming. The plateau had been SI territory since the First War of Palestine, and was probably the most heavily fortified part, though much of that was using the natural terrain to one's advantage by way of tank shelters, traps, and so on.

The evacuated territory was and had been the site of fierce skirmishing between a Logistics Brigade, several Palestinian PDF brigades, and at least one Soviet army-sized unit group. However, the landmines and improvised explosives laid in streets, by roadsides and in other places were evening the score somewhat, as were the rig-controlled machine guns, trip-wire rocket launchers, and trip-wire grenades. The Allied soldiers were fighting guerrilla-style through one settlement after another, supported by assault helicopters moving them around and Sabres keeping the MiGs at bay. This did however eventually cost the Fifth Supply Flotilla, now an improvised seaborne artillery battery, some of its air cover and resulted in two more corvettes being sunk and a Frigate being towed into dry-dock for repairs. That would not be relevant for now, as the coming battle was too far from the sea for that artillery to matter. They were now going to do things the hard way, with only whatever artillery that could be scrounged up for their support…

Scud missiles, rockets, and howitzer shells rained down around the dug-in tanks, a few were destroyed, but most endured the barrage, though some took damage from near misses or smaller-calibre artillery shell impacts. The barrage soon began to dwindle as aircraft and counter-battery fire raked at the Soviet artillery. After that it was an artillery cat-and-mouse as the main battle lines closed distance on each other, or rather the Soviets surged toward the entrenched SI troops.

T-1955s opened fire with sabot shells as the first wave of Soviet tanks passed the 4000-meter range markers, following 500 meters after loose gaggles of infantry clearing out mines and the like as best as they could. Unfortunately for their progress rate, there were, as per the SI doctrine of "do as the enemy does not expect", NO mines before the 2500-meter line. However, that didn't prevent the Soviet commanders from being paranoid (venturing out blindly had bitten them in the ass enough in Syria with IEDs and the like) and thus kept the Soviet rate of advance locked down to about five kilometres per hour following the infantry.

The Soviet tanks took quite a beating before the infantry formation broke and allowed the armour to surge past, closing toward the effective range of their own guns. Their HEAT shells weren't very accurate at long range, far less than sabots, so even though they were firing, it was more suppressive fire than anything else. They ran past the 2500 meter line's little markers… and pretty soon a series of explosions shook the ground, and not only from the most recent volley of sabots striking home on the T-55s.

The Soviet tanks' guns were most accurate at closer ranges as their barrels were shorter, so to get accurate shots (over 75% hits) firing from low speed they needed to get to 2000 meters. Sadly for them, this involved a 700-meter-wide minefield with a density of one anti-tank landmine per square meter. Standard SI minefields were designed to be easy to clean up after a battle, though it took some effort to deploy properly. It was mostly a publicity gimmick, but it also tended to make them more tolerated by the locals whose land they were using for combat, or at least, made the battles less unpopular. The fact that they cleaned up most of the battlefield wreckage afterward also helped popular opinion of the SI military in both Client and non-Client states. It also helped future troop movements, but that was "beside the point" according to SI propaganda. (We the archivsts call bullshit on that count.)

The main thing was that putting a minefield at that range from friendly defences made killing inferior enemy tanks with anti-tank weapons easy but often required the enemy to close distance and move into the field to get accurate shots with their own tank guns. It was a tactic essentially designed and built for not-quite-symmetric warfare (asymmetric warfare is when the two sides are completely discrepant in weaponry tech level, this wasn't quite it) against massed enemy offensives. As for enemy minesweepers, the vehicular ones could be dealt with at 2500-plus meters range by anti-tank fire and the infantry could be cut down by 40mm HE shells fired by APCs and those T-1955s and T-1945s fitted with them as their secondary weapons.

In other words, the best way to clear the minefield laid before the Soviets now in a combat situation was probably to run a couple battalions' worth of T-1955s through it with dozer blades working away and engines revved up to max. The SI testers had found out the hard way that the 2500-horsepower engines if left on long enough on an unimpeded run could destroy the 100-ton tanks' tracks and damage the suspension by eventually reaching dangerous speeds where the track joints would fail. It was then found that the hideously overpowered engine was in fact good not only as it was relatively quiet, powerful, and shared with the MCV-1956,but also as it could keep the tank moving at relatively high speeds cross-country even while ploughing out its own trench. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they had not yet learned to fit their tanks with dozer blades as the T-55s were manufactured crudely en masse without such frills as external power cords, accessory mounts, etc.

This meant that for the work hours invested in every T-1955 coming out of an SI factory in Canada (some of the small-arms manufacturing and civilian technology assembly was outsourced to Client States as a gesture of friendship and economic support, but none of the heavy work) the Soviets could build as many as 5 T-55s. The only problem with that was that fact that running at maximum on-road speed the T-55 would need upward of two minutes to close distance from 4000 to 2000 meters. The T-1955's sabots were essentially effective at direct-hit kills up to 4000 meters against any tank that was not a super-heavy, a T-1945 or another T-1955. Beyond that, accuracy dropped too far for damage done to be worth announcing your position or at least general direction to the enemy. In two minutes, a T-1955 could fire off as many as 20 shells given an experienced crew, and even a freshly-trained crew could score at least 10 kills on even evasive T-55s with that many shots. The only thing was the flight time of the round giving time for quick turns to dodge. This was all assuming the T-1955 stayed stationary, which, unless it was entrenched, did not happen. It could handily outrun the T-55s and with four-pod locomotion outmanoeuvre them too. The only thing that prevented the match-up from becoming absurd was the fact that the Soviets had far more factories, producing over 5000 tanks a month versus SI's mere 300 T-1955s per month. Given the right circumstances, T-55s COULD outmatch T-1955s by overrun.

The Golan Heights did NOT present the right circumstances, as it was mostly more or less flat and the hills were integrated into the defensive firing line the local SI commander had assembled as per doctrine with a few improvisations. Here, it was shaping up to be a massacre as the Soviet shifted much of their artillery from counter-battery sniping to cratering the minefield to try to clear as much as possible. The T-55s began to retreat at 0626 hours local time, a quarter of an hour after sunrise, while infantry advanced in a loose horde. Due to a slight shortage of artillery (pre-occupied with massed counter-battery fire) the commanders had to improvise as to what weapons to use on the horde. The Middle East Theatre Commander had forbidden the use of chemical weaponry, but that didn't mean they couldn't use one of the oldest tools known to man…

The fields had already been harvested for spring wheat and the hay had been cut, plus there was no automated irrigation system, so spraying gasoline into the air was out. However, there was nothing stopping air-dropping gasoline, and that was exactly what they did. Using crop dusters was out, as the Soviet infantry could shoot the low-flying planes up easily, but using bombs with hulls rigged to fragment at a given altitude would hopefully work. It didn't work as well as expected, as it didn't result in a sea of fire, but it was still enough to do some damage and light some fires, thus funnelling the enemy advance and producing better kill zones for the machine-guns and 40mm cannons of the entrenched vehicle and fortification line.

Needless to say, infantry advances on open terrain weren't a good idea, unless with a lot of armoured and air support. Soon the SI units were engaged by MiGs and were forced to direct most of their 40mm guns skyward in addition to what few surface-to-air missiles they'd managed to obtain. They needed to hold for at least seventeen more hours despite the ground constantly shaking with the pounding of artillery shells and missiles. The bombardment had been claiming victims steadily, and a handful of burning pyres dotted the SI lines already.

The defenders were expecting the next rush to be elsewhere, somewhere with more hills and thus shorter lines of sight for the defenders. They got a nasty surprise when this did not occur. Having already sent most of the next ammunition delivery to the harder-to-defend sectors, they had to run on what they had for the next twenty minutes. It was twenty minutes of being charged full-tilt by Soviet tanks after the infantry cleared some paths through the minefield (or rather, the mines were set off remotely en masse to totally wreck the infantry formations). Having shuffled some tanks and APCs toward harder-to-defend areas already, the first line of defenders were running the risk of being overrun. By 0846, through an hour of hide-and-seek between tanks in bomb craters and small hills, The defenders had traded a few dozen tanks for hundreds of Soviet tanks and many thousands of Soviet infantrymen. Most of the losses were from artillery damage or swarming by Red Army units, but still the enemy was coming in a vast horde… They had to retreat to avoid being overrun by enemy tanks (flamethrower-fitted vehicles were dealing with infantry just fine), and so they did, falling back toward the second defence line two kilometres back, backing up at high speed and firing on the move.

A few more T-1955s and T-1945s fell victim to swarms of shells during the tactical retreat, but they claimed far, FAR more victims than their own losses. This was expected with the 110mm guns of the T-1955s killing T-55s frontally with a single blow at any non-absurd angle, and with the 95mm guns of PSDF T-1945s managing to pierce through most of the time on a decent frontal hit or any flank shot with sabots. In response, the Soviet HEAT shells were less accurate when fired on the move given the high speed their targets were taking even in reverse, and could not penetrate the composite armour glacis of either Allied tank in a single blow (or even two blows). This was not unexpected as the T-1945's glacis had been up-armoured to reliably resist the T-1955's gun at ranges over 2000 meters, at least, for the first shot. Armour integrity tended to drop too far for a second direct hit to be warded off, though if the tank turned slightly and moved somewhat… there was a chance that the second shell would not penetrate, but it was no guarantee.

The battle was dragging on toward noon, and the SI tanks were running low on ammunition, as in going under 150% of the ostensible "base number" of shells carried per tank. The crews actually had to slow down to transfer shells easier from stowage into the turret autoloader, the "passenger compartment" at the back of the tanks, the heaviest armoured of all parts but the glacis, was not quite designed (nor was it usually used) for what its name suggested. Wave after wave of Soviet troops rushed the lines and were cut down, but herded by fear of their officers and the artillery barrage the Soviet guns were putting down behind them, they kept on charging, swamping the defences and overrunning several bunkers before the defenders brought up more flamethrower fuel and pushed them back. The number of tank husks on both sides piled up with alarming speed as the Soviet artillery, the ones not dedicated to counter-battery fire, took their toll of attrition on the tanks and bunkers. Scud missiles, what few hit, would typically kill any tank in a single hit and severely damage a bunker, but that was the big problem: they had to hit, and given the defences were drawn in lines instead of hordes, there was no "center of formation" to aim for to increase the chances of a hit. The fact that the lines were spaced hundreds of meters apart to decrease the chances of shells or missiles hitting a different line than the one they were targeted at did not help the Scuds do more damage, especially as the damned thing couldn't hit the side of a barn unless it was at short range.

In other words, the Soviets were still losing tanks at many times the rate of the Allies, but it turned out the intelligence reports weren't quite accurate. It seemed that these were no regular Tank Armies being thrown at them. No, these were heavily-reinforced and bulked-up units, so the massacre of tanks was taken in stride as the day went on. Fighters or parts thereof fell to the ground every once in a while, thousands of tank shells and millions of rounds of small-calibre ammunition were fired, and hundreds of supply runs were made. One tactical retreat followed another as positions became untenable with the red tide threatening to drown them in blood if nothing else. (Archivists' Note: well, there were anti-tank rockets carried by the Soviet infantry that could swarm and kill the Allied tanks, but that sounded considerably less dramatic than what we decided to put in the final version of this archive.) As the sun moved west, Soviet attacks became more lacklustre, dying out completely, with the last Soviet armoured units disappearing over the horizon at 1400 hours as the sun began to get in the eyes of the Soviet troops and continued engagement became even more unfavourable. They would return once night fell, and the tired defenders knew it. Still, Allied men and women took time to restock on ammunition and fuel (be it for engines or flamethrowers) before resting, awaiting nightfall.

Only picket units were woken up at nightfall by the late-afternoon watchers, as no attack was expected before 2000 hours, two hours after the sun was right at the level of the horizon (it was a few days after the equinox, ergo sunset was only a bit after 1800 hours). They were close to being on the money, but the Allied forces arrayed on the lines, having shuffled around since the last Soviet aerial recon flyover, still had to wait for nearly an hour listening only to their own artillery laying down hell toward the Soviet artillery's expected positions, the Soviet encampment areas and of course sweeping the expected locations of the Soviet forces. They were buckled-up, obviously, just in case, but it was still quite some time (vehicle crews taking turns napping) before the soviet artillery began to fully respond instead of just firing counter-battery shells. Those didn't exactly deter the SI artillery much as they were constantly moving around randomly every few shots anyhow just in case, and only in a few cases had non-truck-mounted artillery, but were still rather annoying anyways.

At 2100 hours the first reports came in of massive enemy forces seeping into the Allied lines from the east and northeast, machine-gun tracers lighting up the night as well as the occasional sheet of flamethrower fire. Small-arms fire and the whoosh of rockets clashed throughout the night as the hordes of Soviet infantry swarmed into the enemy fortifications, destroying Allied forces bunker by bunker, trench by trench. Allied tanks, damaged in the daytime and only having rough field repairs, were succumbing to sheer damage as they were swarmed by Soviet infantry and armour. Rockets and artillery shells crisscrossed overhead as the two sides' longer-ranged weapons slugged it out as fast and hard as they could, what guns, rockets and missiles remained after the exchanges of the daytime and evening. The battle began with the allied heavy armour at seventy percent strength, factoring in damage and such. 75% of the vehicles were still combat-capable, but scars dotted their armour and many weren't expected to last long in another firefight. By 2300 hours the percentage of capable vehicles had dropped to 60 percent and the estimated combat strength to fifty percent. Another three kilometres had been lost as the lines moved west steadily, yet these battle lines began to solidify in the night as the Soviet units reached toward their breaking points of casualties and hardware losses.

At midnight, 0000 hours, on September 26, 1957, the Battle of the Golan Heights was right back where it started, five kilometres EAST of the positions one hour ago. The T-1955s, the 600 that remained out of the over 900 that had begun the battle, had been ordered to the attack, smashing into and through the Soviet lines, which, being on the offensive, were not entrenched and thus didn't have anything close to the degree of protection the battered T-1955s offered. Allied infantry, supported by APCs and T-1945s (Raider IIs) were clearing out Soviet troops trench by trench with flamethrowers, grenades, and small-arms. The battle moved slowly into Syria in the night, and by daybreak the T-1955s, having manoeuvred wildly for the last seven hours on the attack, had to stop to reload on ammunition before moving further east. They were thirty-five kilometres inside Syria by that point, yet the effective strike force had dwindled to a "mere" 400 tanks, about half of which were limping along on less than a full set of functional track pods. Only 200 of the functioning tanks still had functional secondary weapons, the rest had their explosion venting flaps on that side blasted open as they had been designed to do when the secondary weapon magazine (or fuel compartment depending on configuration) was breached.

The Soviet units, about 300,000 combat-capable soldiers (about 200,000 more were already dead, wounded or missing) had been ALMOST surrounded, and as soon as they realized that they were left a gap to escape through, they asked their HQ for permission to run for it. The reply was to stand their ground and bludgeon their way through the Allied lines. The Soviets really had failed to learn from World Wars One and Two that trench warfare didn't work well if the enemy had more and/or better armour to smash you with.

About 50,000 more casualties into a gigantic artillery bombardment (the Allied armoured elements had refilled their ammunition, caught up to, and dealt with Soviet artillery) the local Soviet commander finally decided that he was screwed, and, observing the map, concluded the Allies were only teasing him by leaving that gap in the encirclement. It looked to him to be a two-kilometre-wide kill zone where Allied armour could run rampant and artillery could bottleneck his troops at will. He ordered all units to break out to the north while he and his rearguard stayed and bought them more time as the Allied units pushed in from the east.

For once, the Soviets managed to pull a surprising move. A full 150,000 of the soldiers made it out of the gap they tore in the allied lines despite Allied units responding as best they could given the thundering herd of conscripts blazing through. Another estimated 70,000 men were killed during the escape, over a distance of only two kilometres depth and three kilometres width, an average of one kill per 86 square meters (a bit more than a 9x9 meter square in area), with 30,000 more wounded and/or captured Soviets. The commander in question and 50,000 men fought to the last bullet before surrendering, though it cost another 15,000 casualties to pull it off.

The Allies paid similarly heavily, most of Third Division had arrived overnight, but the two divisions put together had suffered close to 70 percent casualties, with fifty percent overall killed in combat. Their armoured strength was at best about forty percent if you counted patchy, rattling, dragging vehicles with at least one track pod wrecked to be in working order. Repair and salvaging efforts would probably bring that up to about fifty or even 55% if they were lucky. As for the PSDF, they had suffered nearly 80 percent casualties and the armoured strength they had put into the battle came out with only 30% of their tanks still running on three or more track pods. Still, they had managed to stop the main thrust of the Soviet offensive in the Middle East, which was hailed as a great victory.

The militiamen and militants involved in the defence of the Golan heights were also mentioned extensively in the battle report, about 50,000 of these irregulars had participated in fighting off the red menace, and only 10,000 came out of the battle alive, but they had kept their homes safe… The irregulars were a motley bunch, and even included ex-Syrian Army units angered by the devastation of their country by the Soviet invasion. However, as they weren't fitted with masses of main battle tanks, despite being issued standard SI-series infantry weapons, they were mainly dedicated to trench and bunker warfare duty. It didn't take much to convince them to do the dirty work after their lack of tank training (and tanks) was pointed out and that those trenches and bunkers were the areas they could do the most damage from.

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><p><em>European Theatre, Late September, 1957<em>

They had held the Soviets off for now, but the war was far from over. Soviet units were rolling into northern Italy and slowly grinding south, SI's land-based fighting capacity was decimated, and even at sea the Soviet submarine fleets were taking a terrible toll on Allied shipping. American forces were arriving steadily as newly-drafted and trained men were equipped and brought up to the lines, but the initiative rested with the Soviets. To quote Gunter von Esling as he looked around the gathered Generals at the map table in Paris (Carville had been chosen by the group to be the US European Theatre coordinator, over other, higher-ranked men) "Our only choice is to cling on, to shred their every offensive at minimal cost to us, and to wait until they are exhausted and we are prepared once more."

Hannah Shepard snorted darkly from her place at the other end of the table "In other words, once we get reconstituted, we'll kick their asses for chasing us across Central Europe and for beating us up in the Middle East."

Gunter nodded "Yes, how long until you can get reinforcements to recuperate your losses? We can get enough Americans to begin restoring the Allied Armies in a few weeks. Three divisions are en route now, and two more have already reached the ports of western France."

Hannah shook her head "Too long, second-line troops will take three more weeks to get here in any sort of force, and first-line training will take another two months before the men are ready to fight. I don't take conscripts, it's part of how I keep my unit cohesion, efficiency and kill-to-loss ratios so high. However, we are still able to hold the line despite being at little more than half strength. The Middle East currently has the higher priority for manpower and tanks shipped from me, because we can't afford to lose our foothold in that region. Don't expect any more T-1955s to reach the front lines in Europe for the next month, at best. We can't afford a large number of weak units all over the place, at least some of them must be strong." Palestine was also a political icon, a symbol that placing a territory under her sphere of influence would allow it to prosper and be protected all at once. Keeping it intact was critical to obtaining more Client States after the war, of course, she would have to keep Europe safe too to survive in the world, and destroy the Soviet Union to keep it safe.

Carville interjected "So basically we cannot afford launching any major offensive operations before mid-October at the earliest."

Gunter nodded once "That is correct, Ben. Now, we just have to wait patiently."

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><p>AN: If I ever forget, when the time comes, here are some of Kane's old installations that must be mentioned one way or another: Baigong Installation (in China), the Cretan Installation (source of the Antikythera Mechanism, which was a door lock that got torn off by a meteor strike), the Factory of Costa Rica (an ancient malfunction resulted in the stone balls of Costa Rica).

He also tried to start giving mankind electricity too soon, hence the Baghdad Batteries…

There are several other Kane-operated installations, such as the Quacker Array (he renamed it that after Soviet sub crews reported the noise the installation guard units made while on patrol, then eventually wound the patrols down as tensions fell and the likelihood of investigation grew too great) and the South-Eastern Pacific Array, which is the source of several unidentified sounds, i.e. the Bloop, Julia, Upsweep, Whistle, and Slow Down.

There are also MANY UFO sightings attributed to Kane's installations, the Green Fireball sightings of December 1958 to April 1965 (shifted ten years later from real history), The Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter on July 24, 1958 (also 10 years after the real event of our history), and so on.

Also remind me of some of the weirder inventions of militaries, such as the kitty corner shot. My advice: shoot everything that comes around a corner and is not a moving-normally friendly, and/or get the hell out of the way of said thing. Let's also not forget EATR robots that recycle biomass and self-upgrade. Lobby the US Army if you are on the lookout for Terminator. I am SERIOUS. DARPA (the Pentagon's division to "prevent technological surprise to the US") actually proposed a Humvee-plane transformer vehicle… in our reality. In this fic, we'll have transforming vehicles pioneered by the Japanese and then… we'll see, I mean, SI T-1945 and T-1955 tanks are very multi-purpose units that excel in a wide range of situations (anti-infantry if flamethrower secondary, anti-chopper and anti-light armour if 40mm auto-cannon secondary, plus main 110mm anti-tank gun), but the Japanese units from RA3 are SO SPECIFIC! Their transforming versatility kind of goes to waste too as they have to be in combined-arms form to work. We shall see…

We shall also see certain amusing or maybe just alarming shenanigans featuring a certain busty black-haired, never-will-be-married, essentially-immortal (she believes this to be her curse) woman we all should know by this point in the story in Saudi Arabia. It is one of many things that eventually brought her into the War On Terror as, indirectly, the Global Liberation Army. Don't worry, I will make it make sense (including problems with modern day) for her to back the irregulars, and retaliate when the US launches the War on Terror, or as most call it, World War Six.

PREVIEW:

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><p>Hannah was discussing business with her subordinates (several men and women) and typing on her laptop in the Starbucks when a small army of police cars pulled up to the front of the store. "I TOLD you so." Her secretary, a man, murmured, looking around at the men who had originally been in the restaurant, who were now withering under the glares of the half-dozen soldiers they had for bodyguard detail.<p>

She rubbed her brows with her fingers in annoyance and sighed as the cops came in the front door. "Escorts, authorizing code Over-Cooked-Dingo." OCD, well, these guys sure had it regarding their women… it was "deeply immoral" to greet or converse with a man other than her husband or father without either being present. Well, they would understand what it meant when the woman in question parked her command tank behind a hedge next to the restaurant in a vain attempt not to scare the shit out of anybody.

"Under the laws of Saudi Arabia…" the policeman started before the ground began to tremble and the cups not in hands began to rattle on tables. A quickening chop-chop-chop and then whirring noise was also heard coming from outside.

"I have diplomatic immunity." She stated simply, "Generalissimo Hannah Shepard, I just talked with you, a man, openly in public, I'm unmarried and my father isn't around, what are you going to do about it?"

The lead cop's frown deepened while he was thinking until his subordinate tapped him on the shoulder weakly, he turned and began to bark in Arabic the equivalent of "what the hell are you poking me for… oh shit." When he'd first looked around when the trembling started he'd seen nothing, but now…

"Now if you'll excuse me I've just finished my food and will be on my way, thank you very much." She walked past the men, trailed by her secretaries and guards, who were clearly raring to tear the Saudi cops into fillets.

Outside, more than a dozen of SI's finest Main Battle Tanks were parked in a ring around the police cars, with three assault helicopters overhead and two APCs. Hannah's staff and guards went to the APCs while she climbed up onto the glacis of her command tank. After a moment of hesitation, she spoke into the open commander's cupola for the driver to leave her post and go sit in the back while she took over. In flagrant violation of Saudi Arabia's laws against women driving, Hannah Shepard went in the driver's cupola, sealed it behind her, and revved the tank's engine before the armoured column moved off on their way to Riyadh, the capital of the country, for a conference she had been INVITED to.

She was later accused of, along with the recent revolutions in Tunisia and such, inciting massed riots in Saudi Arabia and accelerating the progress of the Arab Spring GREATLY. With the newest edition of the Civilian Armaments Doctrine, a vastly popular book made available for sale to civilians to make money, several things happened. Reinforced motorcycle helmets complete with gas filter, radio mike and headphones, and even a tactical HUD projector, had suddenly been in demand, hence why they happened to have several thousand of them on-hand. No one doubted where the helmets came from, but technically it covered more than even Saudi traditions demanded of women's heads, so it and the improvised body armour also shipped out didn't bring more of an accusation (i.e. it was not encouraging immoral dress) than fomenting revolt. They were also shipped over a thousand war walkers, mostly leftovers from the Fifth World War.

To quote Shepard on the matter "If your women do not have access to one of the first major inventions of mankind, the wheel, to facilitate their mobility, then they will have to use feet to overcome this hurdle, no?" Saudi women were not allowed to drive cars or ride bikes, hence… yeah. Her Propaganda Division and Black Ops units were sparking sympathy protests and crushing police-provocateur riots in support of this relatively peaceful revolution (she didn't ship the protestors guns, only armour and vehicles, though it was not recommended for police to park their cars directly in the way of a King Oni even if said King Oni had the main ranged weapons stripped away) all over the world, and HELL it was about time things changed. If they were arresting and beating women for driving cars… then she'd respond by introducing the men who were doing the beating to the undersides of walker feet for a REAL curb-stomp. Things had to change, and with her immense popularity all over the world except in the most misogynist areas she would champion this cause of liberty. It was unfortunate she couldn't just fuel-air-bomb extreme misogynists out of existence simply as none were on her turf, or at least, none of the ones that still existed… The Psychic Dominator Disaster had given her some good excuses to conduct operations against certain morally bankrupt individuals and groups.

No one outside the Middle East, save her own Propaganda arm, said a word about how she was technically breaking laws just by being in Saudi Arabia, as women were not allowed to own businesses there. The US government was perceiving her as the number-one-threat to world peace after what she did to Japan and her installation of Dasha Fedorovich as leader of the Russian Federation, but their smear campaign was at best keeping the score neutral. It would continue until the day it all came to a head and the War On Terror began, though it was soon renamed World War Six by most non-Americans.

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><p>AN: Be warned, this can get pretty damned nasty toward some extremist groups of some religions or cultures, just like real history. If you prefer not to see what real history would be like given Shepard's generally-paragon tendencies, the semi-arrogance that comes with being so powerful, and female status, feel free to look away and not read this fic. But remember, I am trying to do realism here (other than not explaining how Tesla Coils work). The GLA will actually be a force for good, for example, the UN supply drops in the mission where you have to stop the villagers from taking them were US bio-weaponry tests. Also, remind me of these things if I ever forget: Reading rights is only pre-interrogation, not upon arrest, phone calls in jail aren't a right, that's all Hollywood, but a privilege, and cell phones are taken away (Joker anyone?) on entry. Also, A whole part of these archives will likely be dedicated to the filming of the _Matrix_ series and all the complications there.

REVIEW!


	6. Whispers of the Curtain

A/N: Anonymous Reader/Reviewer, the problem with what you were saying is that while the current would be amped up, the voltage would drop by a similar factor, so the total current multiplied by voltage remains constant. Tesla Coil defence towers rely on high voltage AND high current. As for grounding… we will see just how well that will work.

Lost guy on lost planet… words cannot express how lost you are, the Apocalypse tank grappler in RA3 was suspected to be salvaged form Yuri's Magnetrons. Also, didn't you see my timeline? Time travel = NOT SO EASY, all events in linear timeline, except for a certain pair of events but that was another matter entirely and is after the Fourth Tiberium War.

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><p>Chapter 6: Whispers of the Curtain<p>

_European Theatre, Early October, 1957_

Thankfully, the Soviets seemed to be exhausted too, so the Allies took their opportunities to poke back repeatedly, even if all it involved was sending jeeps with three bombs each, planting them near Soviet bases, and waking said bases up by blowing the charges after the jeeps left, for many nights in a row to deprive the Reds of proper rest. Of course, that was followed by a bunch of fixed-up and very angry M48s (among other tanks) crushing their way through the small outpost bases as part of attrition warfare, but it didn't really make a difference.

What did make a difference was when… To quote Hannah when she saw the report that Gunter had blinked at dumbly for two whole minutes "How the hell did THAT happen?"

"No clue." The European Allied Supreme Commander replied bluntly.

"Time to save my little cousin… who's so far from me in age that she could be my daughter."

"And who looks vaguely older than you." Someone quipped, probably trying to lighten up the black mood in the temporary Allied headquarters in Paris. For the life of her Hannah couldn't remember the names of the British and French guys on the council of commanders, most likely as they didn't do anything much besides accept orders from her, Gunter, Stavros, and Carville. They had raised a few good points in the past, but compared to the yields of good ideas and points Carville and Stavros (not to mention Von Esling) gave they were small potatoes. She had more important things to remember anyhow.

"Yeah, that's not hard, anyone over the age of twenty-two could probably pull that off." The troops from the other Allied armies had probably not exactly been looking her in the eyes when they saluted her in greeting or when she stalked past in combat boots and uniform. Her own troops had been trained to understand that staring too much could earn you a good beating from the woman on the other end if it was overly obnoxious (including words) or if you made any attempts to touch anything. One of the few gender-specific classes for the males was being taught how to treat women with respect with minimal irritation of the women involved, for women, it was lessons on how to not be pushovers. "I don't think that's relevant, how about we start considering how we ought to get Tanya out?"

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><p><em>Later… 17 hours later to be precise…<em>

"You have got to be kidding me." Hannah stated in disbelief as Gunter illustrated the tactical situation at the recently-built Soviet sub base in Denmark where Tanya was being held for now. "You didn't send enough forces to guarantee the base gets destroyed!"

"I think I did." Gunter stated simply "This northern base has a mountain of crates for assembly of T-55s, since your T-1955s are rather heavy, we'll want to seize the Soviets' own weapons and turn them against the Reds for numbers and surprise if nothing else."

"I hope you at least used T-1945s for the initial job."

"Yeah, the transport barges can take up to 300 metric tons absolutely safely, I put five Wehrmacht T-1945Ds on each barge." The old tanks, despite the most recent upgrades, had somehow still kept their combat-ready mass at only 59 tons, only two tons up from the original 57 tons. "We also have a good number of infantry and APCs to fight off the Soviet infantry, plus a bunch of engineers to reprogram the buildings."

"Good, what about Tanya?"

"That truck" Gunter tapped the circled supply truck in the aerial photographs, parked outside the War Factory in the northern outpost, right in front of the mountain of crates with T-55 parts "We're sending in a spy to hitch a ride through the main Soviet base to the tech facility Tanya's being held at, our window is narrow and the guard dogs will recognize him if he gets too close to them, so he needs to do this carefully."

"I hope he's good enough to pull it off, otherwise we'll have to expend a number of heavy units to get Tanya back." Hannah stated bluntly. "I have a landing force with seven Corvettes, loaded with two T-1955s each, ready to charge the beaches near Tanya's area." She pushed the icons onto the map where they should be at the moment "They can lay down suppressive fire and quickly eliminate these four SAM sites so that Tanya can be extracted by assault chopper. Your spy only needs to make sure they don't try to shoot Tanya when we break into their base through the back door and you come knocking on the front."

Gunter had a rather annoyed expression "This could have been so much simpler if you told me earlier about your back-up plan…"

"True, but it's better to have a two-pronged attack. Assault choppers can support my armour and pick off anything the Soviets have that tries to run away, and we can wipe the entire base out easily once we get Tanya out. They have practically no decent anti-air cover left after we kill those four SAM sites, other than these two SAM sites here and here. They'll be dealt with by artillery support from the Frigates and Destroyer I'm sending in as fire support, then we can send in the choppers in force from the Carriers to support the ground attack." SI Carriers of all types, due to not having a suitable jet aircraft of adequate reliability and quality, were currently serving as giant helipads and missile batteries. "They'll pay for taking Denmark and challenging us in the North Sea the way they're doing now."

"We're annihilating them in the Pacific, but not so much in the Atlantic or the North Sea." Carville stated "The Soviet Pacific Fleet is being destroyed every time they try to rebuild it by the US Navy and your Pacific Fleet" He was looking at Hannah, who of course had to maintain a solid presence in North Korea for political as well as humanitarian purposes. "This attack will set them back in the North Sea a little, I hope. It's one of their major logistics bases supporting their submarine bases and pens on the west coast of Denmark."

"Don't worry, we'll set them back as far as is feasible, but what's important is that we get Tanya back." Hannah replied.

"Agreed, let's get the show on the road then…"

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><p><em>Denmark, October 6, 1957<em>

The spy walked around the entire outpost before heading in as the guard dogs got out of the way. Hitching a spot in the back of the supply truck was easy, waiting the three hours for the driver to get there and take the truck away was rather more irritating. After half an hour of driving and pulling through two checkpoints, They reached the facility and the spy snuck out.

Silently taking out three guards, he opened the door into Tanya's holding room after hearing through the door the interrogator talk to her. Unfortunately, even after shooting the interrogator twice, he still managed to get the spy once through the heart an instant before Tanya whipped her chair around and nailed the bastard in the head. Having worked her hands relatively loose from her bindings, she pulled them free and turned the chair into a bludgeon. Grabbing the gun off the dying spy, she shot the interrogator once through the head before scavenging the spy's ammunition and breaking out of the facility, taking down guards as she blazed a path out into the battlefield outside.

Both in the north and in the south the beaches had been charged by transports. In the north, where the water was shallower, the transport barges charged the beaches and unloaded their tanks almost directly onto the beaches. In the south, the corvettes backed toward the beaches, opened their stern doors, and put down their loading ramps before the large and heavy T-1955s rolled off them into shallow water before rolling up onto land, cannons bellowing at the Scud launchers parked nearby (the back of the base was a logical place to put the vulnerable launchers), those not yet annihilated by the bombardment the Corvettes had laid down as they approached the shoreline. They had given five minutes after the spy's truck reached the building Tanya was held in, and now it was time to close for the kill. The tanks targeted Scud launchers first, other tanks second, and finally the SAM sites, the two of the four near the tech building not yet levelled by the 200mm guns of SI Frigates or 300mm guns of the lone Destroyer present. They wrecked the SAMs and bottlenecked the Soviet tanks moving toward the area while assault choppers flew in low under the longer-ranged radar of the other two SAM sites over hills a few kilometres away. Tanya was extracted minutes later as the assault choppers began to take up the task of containing the Soviet armour, with the T-1955s mainly relegated to support roles.

Quad cannons were famously fragile to HEAT shells fired from any decent gun, and T-1955s had the best tank gun currently in common use i.e. not counting some pieces of experimental hardware. The rocket pods of the choppers offered extreme kill-power against tanks funnelled into a kill-zone less than five vehicles wide by large rock formations, and the choppers were covered by the T-1955s, especially when they paused and landed to reload the rockets pods on their stubby wings.

The Soviets gave up after a while, and left only a large arc of T-55s, a few Tesla coils (in areas hidden from artillery by hills), and some BM-21 rocket launchers to watch the gap in the ridge. It formed the only path through for either side, even given the high mobility of the T-1955 and the transports available, as the surrounding shoreline was full of cliffs save a few other spots (i.e. where the spy had been first dropped off and where the Allied landing force had landed). They were soon attacked from the north by a lot of commandeered Soviet vehicles, including captured Scud launchers that annihilated the Soviet power plants from afar. They weren't accurate enough to destroy Tesla Coils reliably, but a bunch of power plants put close together to avoid sabotage was a big, juicy target. According to Hannah's plan, if possible (yes, as it had already been done) after the battle the Soviet technologies found would be taken back for study and analysis, especially as to tactical merit and the like. Of course, everyone knew that basically meant "split the loot so that everyone gets a roughly equal share of each of the weapons if possible, if there aren't enough for everyone to get one, SI has priority, then Germany, then the US, then Britain, then France".

However, Allied Supreme Command as a whole had unanimously agreed that if left to the politicians a far less satisfactory division, likely with certain technologies being hoarded by particular factions, would have been reached. Therefore Hannah's plan was accepted with minimal grumblings by everyone, even the British and French generals stayed quiet, as this way they would be guaranteed a share in all looted items where five or more of said item were found instead of risking America hoarding it all. Besides, for a reasonably small fee SI allowed its allies' observers to watch its engineers and researchers as they disassembled captured technologies anyways, a much more open way of doing things than any other faction would have done. As for Carville, he had personally supported the divide, but had to relay the message from his president that the US didn't like the deal too much. However, the fact that it was highly unlikely that less than three of any weapon or technology would be stored in a facility made Mr. President's argument rather dull and utterly ignored except for Carville's obligation to at least relay the message.

While both sides made the narrow passage a kill zone, the artillery being too close to even shell one another except for small-calibre mortars that couldn't do much damage to the tanks parked on either side of the divide, things up north were going south. This was for the Soviets' side, as the commandeered Soviet vehicles overran the Soviet defences and stormed through their base with all guns blazing. As most of the Soviet forces were down south, it wasn't hard, and when the Soviets turned around to save their main base, they were met with a second cluster of T-1955s that had been landed up north and were brought in to augment the kill-power of the Allied strike force sweeping south.

Soon, it was all over, the surviving Soviets surrendered and the loot was rounded up and counted. It was divided up on the spot to load onto the different ships of the different sides, which then sailed away to the west, dropping off cargo at the facilities assigned to each Allied nation in the port of Dunkirk where they dropped anchor.

* * *

><p><em>Paris, France, October 6, 1957<em>

In the meantime, far more meaningful things were happening in Paris at Allied Supreme Command "So the Soviets are designing this… device, is that all you can tell us?"

"They call it the Iron Curtain, but that's all I really know, they weren't exactly discreet, but they didn't give intel to my face either." Tanya shrugged helplessly. "They believe it will end the war in their favour."

"Right, their convoy warfare may be taking a toll on us, but it's less than they expected, hence they are pinning their hopes on a super-weapon, just like every mad dictator has done thus far in history." Hannah stated grimly "At least the Soviets don't have nuclear capability yet, or Stalin will be berserk enough to initiate a total nuclear exchange. We need to end the war before he gets nuclear weapons, or the Soviet Union will burn. We haven't got any more information on the Iron Curtain, not even hints of intel, so it'll have to wait until we have enough information to know where to look for clues. For now, let's focus on getting our armies through the winter."

"I'm mostly worried about Germany, after nearly a decade living there, it's become my home, and nothing good could possibly be happening to it under the Soviets' heel." Gunter stated "do you think it is possible that we could launch a campaign to take it back next springtime?"

"I expect to commission Thirteenth Division sometime next March, we have 70,000 Canadian Army soldiers currently in training to fill in the damage to the SI European and Middle East Theatre Forces, plus 40,000 raw recruits in training. We also have 50-some thousand PSDF troops in training for defending their homeland, that allows them to build a new division in addition to what they must replace, and I have enough industrial surplus capacity to build their Raider IIDs while the assembly lines capable of working on T-1955s are kept at full capacity. I can upgrade some assembly lines, but without more funding…" Hannah spread her hands helplessly, since she was beginning to run tight on funding given her generous support policy for deceased, disabled, and handicapped troops after discharge from front-line service. Some of the less severe cases stayed on in desk jobs, but there were only so many positions available, and the current Canadian government didn't like the war very much, so it wasn't giving as much money as it strictly could have for a total war. "I can't afford more than one new heavy assembly line, and each line can give us fifty T-1955s a month. I know it's not much compared to what everyone else can output in terms of vehicles, but…"

"How much cash do we have to pay you to get two such new assembly lines going?" Carville stated simply.

Hannah rolled her eyes "You mean buying the technology from me? I'm afraid that with the T-1955 being less than five years old we can't license most of the ground technologies out as per the copyright regulations SI has. Hell, we can't even SELL the things to other powers according to regulations before the fourth year after their introduction!" In other words, anything ground-based introduced in 1955 had to wait until January 1, 1959 to be sold to foreign powers. On the other hand, planes and ships could be sold as soon as the year after their introduction and licensed out beginning the third year after introduction.

"Ben means funding with no strings attached, just how much money does it take to build two new assembly lines and raise your T-1955 production by 100 tanks a month? We will just fork over the money, provided you agree to use it for the two assembly lines…" Stavros stated, knowing perfectly well that it was the best bid the Allies could make, definitely far more productive than the Allies' own research projects, and that was if he was polite about it.

Hannah smiled inwardly, this was perfect, getting funding with no strings attached simply because the Allies were too desperate for better tanks to reach the front lines not to, just what she'd been hoping for. "Well…"

* * *

><p><em>Winter of 1957-1958<em>

The two new assembly lines began production on the last day of October, though the first tanks didn't reach the end of the line until November. Hannah had actually been as strapped for funding as she'd made it sound, though she could have built the lines herself with only moderate budget strain, but if the Allies were willing… why not? It was a better investment for the Allies than, to quote Stavros, "damn near anything else we could possibly invest in". She'd already converted four Medium assembly lines into existence for Raider IIs, able to assemble up to 800 or so tanks (T-1955s plus T-1945s) per month if working at maximum intensity 24/7. She did have people working 24/7, though it was mostly POWs working the two half-night shifts, one from 12 to 4 and the other from 4 to 8, so the production was hanging steady at 75 tanks per line per month and was racking in export revenue. However, the fact that she had to produce so many T-1955s too as well as conduct multiple major research projects was eating up most of the revenue, so the profit margin was at best paper-thin and sometimes SI ran a deficit despite all its income sources.

She had hit an especially hard patch with all the recent casualties and the money that had to be set aside for the support of the families of the fallen or handicapped men and women. It was one of the things earning her respect from around the world: she kept to her regulations. Obviously this sometimes irked others such as how the Allies wanted T-1955s as soon as possible, even though they knew the Wehrmacht would have first priority for sales because Germany didn't have a tank design industry of its own anymore. However, she was okay with that as the Allies were doing well tactically against the Soviets anyhow. Now that the Soviets were in Germany and had to expend time and effort to convert the standard-gauge railways to wide-gauge to suit their trains or spend time transferring cargo, they would have difficulty with supplies. This was especially true as winter was coming and would not be good for such work. The Allies had to endure through the winter and recuperate as much as they could to take the Soviet offensives of the spring and push back with greater might.

Fortunately, the Arrow project had come to fruition, and the prototypes had been thoroughly tested. In other words, the unfortunate prototypes had been tested just about everywhere except underwater, underground, and in space, and had various objects thrown at them. These included but were not limited to shrapnel, rocks, bricks, small steel bars, birds, etc. used to test just how efficient the engine filter/containment systems were. The consensus came down to "not very, but good enough that the pilot has time to eject before the engine can ever hope to start burning in any way, shape or form. If it's a fairly small bird going in the engine, the plane will probably even survive to land for repairs." Of course, other aspects were also tested, and it was concluded that even hitting a moderately heavy (read: the biggest, fattest one they could find) Canada Goose at maximum speed wouldn't shatter the windshield, though they had to use multiple thin layers of glass with metallic mesh weave in each layer to accomplish the effect and not hinder the pilot's vision (refraction mattered) or the plane's aerodynamics too much. Of course, it was STRONGLY recommended for any pilot flying an Arrow (now dubbed the V-F-1958A) to land immediately thereafter so that the remains of the bird could be removed and most of the outer layers of the forward windshield replaced with new panes. The plane had been fitted with two 20mm cannon mounts, using six-barrelled deployment, though electrically spun up whenever the pilot toggled their weapon of choice. The air-to-air missiles the Arrow currently employed were a modified version of the mid-range surface-to-air missiles used by SI surface forces. These were rather unlike the long-range surface to air missiles developed and deployed by other factions to defend against strategic combers, as SI was more concerned about close air support for its regular ground forces and relied on interceptors to deal with strategic bombers.

The computer systems were of good quality (some of the first transistor-based systems), though they weren't quite top of the line, since Jane was expecting computer technology to advance by great leaps and bounds and the electronics on all the Arrows would probably need replacing within five years or less. Hannah had agreed with her younger sister's opinion and so production had gone ahead without any debate between the siblings. The first combat deployments of the F-1958 came in December of 1957 in what were termed "combat trials", where the prototypes and some of the first craft produced were sent against the Soviets.

It was a tactical disaster for the Reds as the delta-winged fighters crossed into Germany's airspace at their cruising speed of about Mach 0.7. Hannah had wanted supersonic cruise capability, but Jane had found it too difficult with current technology and settled for high subsonic cruising speed. The small forward wings and strips added near the front of the engine intakes allowed superb control, and the fighter-bombers were built sturdily, allowing them to pull off all sorts of manoeuvres in dog-fighting with the MiG-15s rising to intercept. They also had better missiles, especially as they had a large radar set in the nose of the aircraft to target with, unlike the MiGs. Being able to hit speeds close to or over Mach 2 despite dog-fighting didn't hurt either given how sturdy the construction of the planes was.

After delivering a beating to the MiGs and out-flying the slow SAMs fired at them, the three formations of F-1958s, sixteen planes each, flew toward the three biggest Soviet supply yards in Germany with their rocket pods at the ready. Internal ammunition bays had been typical of SI-designed fighters, but with jet engines… the risk of overheating and cooking off the ammunition had to be weighed with the improved aerodynamics that could be gained from internal ammunition bays. Also to be considered was the limitations of computer systems, data interfacing, and radar-guided missiles of the present day. Hence they had abandoned the old internal storage system for now. In other words, they'd decided to leave a large space in the fuselage complete with high-powered cooling systems, currently filled with some bulky computer systems and extra stowage space. The pilots realized after a while that they were flying something that could be turned into a cargo hauler at any moment after better electronics were invented, but they were okay with it.

The stowage space also meant several extra fuel tanks could be mounted internally to extend the range of the plane without hampering manoeuvrability significantly (no extra air resistance made keeping the things while in battle both economical and not too impractical) Those supply yards went up in sheets of fire and flames as ammunition stockpiles, vehicles, men and everything else was showered with anti-tank rockets fired from the same type of pods that were used on assault choppers. Given two pods stuck on each fighter (they had 8 hang points but each had mounted 6 ATA missiles) the groups of F-1958s had 512 rockets to fire at each Soviet supply base.

Horizontally against the front plating of a T-55, an old-fashioned 80mm anti-tank rocket was a maybe (single launchers could be fitted with a larger HEAT warhead that was 160mm across for guaranteed kills, but the pods had to stick with the old rockets), but against the top plating or at a good angle of attack, any decent hit was at least a disabling and was probably a kill. Given so many rockets to let fly, the fighters didn't bother aiming too much, more so because they weren't exactly accurate rockets. They simply flew in formation, pitched down somewhat, and let fly all their rockets at once at ground-attack speed (i.e. about 500 km/h). Once the rockets were done firing in rippling volleys, they all pulled their noses up and away, turning to return to base. The first combat missions of the F-1958 had been pulled off without a single combat loss… save one plane's left engine which had died on the way home due to eating some armour-piercing bullets fired by a Quad Cannon. It had managed to limp back to base on one engine though as the damaged engine had shut down in time to prevent a fire.

The F-1958 was about to become the main SI fighter and the premier fighter of the Allied side of the war… which was one of the other reasons why Hannah had to ask the Allies for funding support for T-1955 production lines. Producing the planes and modifying the aircraft assembly lines to deal with the heavy fighters instead of the light fighters they dealt with before (like the Sabre) was expensive… but they would get through. They always had and with Jane at the helm of the production effort at home, always would get through.

It was a tough winter, a winter of regular skirmishes and battles in the long and dark nights, supply difficulties as the war in the North Atlantic went one way and then the other, and constant war in the air as the two sides vied for air superiority. Yet when the sun rose on the spring equinox of 1958, announcing the beginning of spring, nothing had really changed. The Soviet offensive in Norway had halted with the Allies barely clinging on, the Soviet Mediterranean submarine fleets hadn't quite been contained in the Aegean and Adriatic, the battles in the Middle East were still raging with the Allies pushing the Soviets back into northern Iraq and Syria, and the Soviets had been pushed out of the eastern reaches of France while conquering their way down Italy. Damaging supply lines repeatedly had taken their toll on the vast Red Army, especially in terms of food supplies, and Soviet morale was riding low in the water. The Allies had also sustained losses over the winter, but production and reinforcements had brought their formations back up to strength, just like the Soviets had managed to do over the winter months.

* * *

><p><em>Spring, 1958<em>

One problem with that balance of forces was the fact that the Allies, or one faction thereof, were much better than the Soviets at coiling a focused punch. In the pre-dawn hours of April 1, 1958, about 4000 T-1955s and 2000 T-1945Ds (they were so sorely lacking in T-1955s that they resorted to using production of the old 1945Ds to fill up the gap for now) surged over the French border stabbing east through the Soviet lines. They were followed by about a million Allied troops and their vehicles flooding through the gap in the Soviet lines, encircling and annihilating pockets of resistance. Attacking armoured columns surged against them, and were broken utterly by assault choppers and T-1955s in the fore of the attack. By the end of the first day they had reached Kiel and cut off a large chunk of the Red Army from retreating. They would be given one opportunity to surrender, if they chose to resist, they would be smashed, then given another chance to surrender, if they refused, well, they would be cut down to the last man.

It ended in 90,000 Red Army men marching into captivity after five times that number had died in combat and artillery-based butchery. Storming across the North German Plain wasn't hard, especially as half of the eight divisions SI had in the field were spearheading a rapid advance through the Fulda Gap to cut into eastern Germany and the Soviets were busy trying to defend themselves on all fronts from the surprising Allied push. Having been preparing for an offensive left them in bad shape for defensive operations and long sieges as their main stockpiles were of fuel and ammunition instead of food and ammunition, plus they didn't have nearly as many fortifications as they could have had. They'd' disassembled most of their Tesla Coils in preparation of moving them west, since production wasn't keeping up well with demand.

Without Tesla Coils, they were essentially screwed against the mighty tide of heavy tanks the Allies (mostly SI, but Germany also had T-1945s for its army's main tanks) drowned them under. The Medium Tanks and Light Tanks followed after and helped with envelopments, ambushes, and of course hitting the enemy from every direction at once. In less glorified terms, they mopped up after the surging, pulsing thunder of the T-1955s and T-1945s, cleaning up whatever was left and forming circumvallation and contravallation-type defence rings. This was because despite being cheaper and less time-consuming to assemble, they simply could not keep up with the SI-built tanks in speed, firepower, protection or endurance. They simply didn't have 1000 litres of water storage per vehicle for the troops or space for a couple crates of food tins in addition to space for extra fuel canisters and ammunition.

Well, maybe the 1000-litre label was not always accurate, recently, someone had had the bright idea to put water tanks into the space between the layers of the glacis to free up more room in the tank itself for hardware. After a few trials by fire, it was found that the high-pressure steam was very destabilizing to the superheated particulate streams typical of HEAT rounds that the Soviets used. It was however decided not to use the water tanks for something that mundane, though the search was now beginning for something else that could react with incoming projectiles and reduce their damage capability. Hey, now that some more money was available with the Arrow project being successfully concluded under budget and only a little bit over time (though this meant the research squad in question would not be allowed to requisition more time on their next project without losing the completion bonus cheque), why not research better protection for tanks?

The Italian campaign was escalating as the Italians rallied near Taranto and pushed back with all their might, stopping the Soviets dead in their tracks as Allied forces, these one mainly American, swept in from the northwest of the country. This resulted in a moment of indecision by Soviet commanders as to priorities, a moment that would eventually prove lethal, several months later, to Soviet ambitions in Italy. They chose to focus on holding ground already taken against the Americans instead of chasing the Italians into the sea first. That was a bad mistake as several American corps were transported over to the toe of the Italian boot and attacked beginning on 23 April.

By the 15th of May, slightly over 9000 Soviet T-55s had been destroyed and dragged away for scrap metal by the Allies, at a cost of around 2000 Allied tanks. This was mostly due to the T-1955s leading most major assaults being almost immune to the T-55's guns at any range without extensive previous damage to the armour. However, news soon came of more information associated with the Iron Curtain Project in the Soviet submarine bases in the Aegean Sea. As Greece, Crete, and Cyprus were still in Soviet hands, and they couldn't afford not getting that Iron Curtain information, whatever the secret Soviet project might be. So, here they were, the senior officers discussing the operation…

"Why?"

"We all know the Allied Fleets are tied up enough holding the blockade around the Adriatic, Greece, the Aegean and the Turkish coast, Shepard, we can't afford to spare any warships… but you can." Carville stated "The Middle East is cooling down now, and the Fifth Supply Flotilla's just finished running a major shipment, it's available for use as a naval strike force."

"Just because it's available doesn't mean we should use it, there's Cyprus to worry about, we can't starve the island, but we need to stop subs from leaving it intact. My own subs are hard-pressed to keep them contained, you know." Hannah argued back.

After half an hour of squabbling between everyone present except Stavros and Gunter, the latter made a loud noise of frustration and threw his arms up in a gesture that drew everyone's attention. "I'm sorry, Hannah, but we don't think anyone can pull this job off other than you."

"Great, say something I can't refuse, will you? Alright, but remember, guys, you owe me big for this. What are the specifics of the operation?"

"I was hoping you'd say that, here are aerial photos, the main research centers are here, here, and here." Stavros pointed out three Tech Center buildings, of the type the Soviets deployed in the field to safeguard and if needed to self-destruct the blueprints for their more advanced technologies. After all, an MCV could only store so much data given present technologies, and many buildings offered their own construction options with the data they safeguarded. "We need to infiltrate them with spies, ideally distracting them with probing attacks in the meantime. They will have subs in the area and vehicles, we need to go in light, go in fast, and get out similarly quickly with the plans. After stealing their data and documents, we need to level the base completely to hamper their research."

"There's only one person for this job." Hannah observed simply. Everyone in the room smirked in unison.

* * *

><p><em>Somewhere in the Aegean Sea, May 19, 1958<em>

"Sometimes, I REALLY hate this job." Tanya Adams muttered to herself as she scanned the Soviet base again through her binoculars, taking more notes as to the schedule of the guards and their dogs. The diversion was planned to be tomorrow at sunrise, with the squad infiltrating from the east while a handful of Corvettes shelled the base from the west, relying on known coordinates and calculations simply as the sun's glare wasn't great for accurate targeting. Anyhow, that was sixteen hours away, and the infiltration squad needed to get closer. Clutching their battle rifles at the ready, the men and women of her squad moved silently through the underbrush, scanning the ground carefully for the tell-tale three-spike trigger of landmines. They had carefully defused all the mines in their area they'd found over the last two days since infiltrating the island by submarine, but there was always the risk of new mines being sown since their last sweep.

They camped just inside the forest line east from the Soviet base for the night, though they were up before dawn running final checks and maintenance on their battle rifles, SMGs, pistols, and rocket launchers. For obvious reasons, they had access to the newest hardware, including the 160mm diameter HEAT warheads the 80mm rocket body could be fitted with. Sneaking through the last bit of open ground before the Soviet base before dawn, they waited for the shelling to begin, and it did so right on time as Tanya and co. flattened themselves along the concrete wall around the base. Alarms and shouts could be heard form inside as the men were drawn away toward the other where the booming of tank guns from T-1955s landed by the corvettes joined the sounds of light artillery fire from the small ships.

After that, they basically walked in the door of the base, walking in the tracks of vehicles that had passed by yesterday. There was no risk of mines there as the tracks and gate had been watched by the squad since the vehicles passed, and no mines had been laid there. They quickly made their way toward the first of the three Tech Centers, breaking in through the front door and neutralizing everyone they could find, some by bullets, some by bayonets, and most by a sharp whack to the head. They wanted prisoners if possible… the alarm still wasn't raised toward them, so they didn't need to mow everyone down as fast as possible.

Since the Allied raid was being disguised as what it was for now, a raid, it wasn't pushing too far into the base, and especially not toward the tech centers (though they were smashing up as much of the rest of the base as possible). Tanya and co. thus had free reign basically to move north and take down the next Tech Center after commandeering a truck and using old NKVD uniforms they'd brought with them to get the research data wholesale out of the base through the eastern gate. The gate guards had been replaced already by commandos, and those seeing the truck leave were completely fooled by the NKVD insignia (and Russian-speaking ability) of the two in the truck.

The second Tech Center went much like the first, but as the raid in the southwest of the base moved east, a problem occurred with the third Tech Center in the northwest of the base. The Soviets had sealed off the west gate as it was too risky to move through anymore, so Tanya's lot had to either escape through the guarded north gate or go through the war zone near the middle of the base.

They chose to go north, two rockets taking out two of the T-55s guarding the north entrance as Tanya and co. gunned down every man there in a few seconds. This was just before their own commandeered T-55 opened fire into the flank of another T-55 which went up in a ball of fire. After that, it was a hell-for-leather run out of the base and for the cover of the woods in one of the heavily armoured Ore Trucks they'd nabbed from where it was parked next to a Field Refinery, abandoning their T-55 after it lost a track. The Soviets didn't chase them very far as HA-1957 assault helicopters settled in and destroyed the pursuers before the T-1955s smashed down the rest of the resistance on the island long enough for almost everyone (those not dead) to get away safely.

Tanya's crew had pulled off another delicate mission… and in time for the fleet to run under the aerial coverage of Arrows flying from Palestine before any MiGs could catch up. The big fighters had been fitted with four extra fuel tanks each inside their internal bays, and had eight ATA missiles each, so they had enough range and firepower to provide air cover without any trouble. With the demands Hannah had forced upon the development team, they could stay in the air longer than light fighters like the MiG-15 could given the same relative amount of fuel (as a percentage of full regular tanks) due to efficient engines. That was the one thing that prevented the research team from getting a chunk shaved out of their project bonus cheques (for being over their allocated time) by Jane, the difficulty that came with engineering a fighter able to FAR outdo all others to date and that were said to be in development.

Sure, it couldn't handle the seven tons of ammunition the F-4s the Us Navy was testing (the first test-flight had been a success on May 18, 1958) was rumoured to be able to do, but it could take a decent few tons. The hang-points on the wings, two on each wing, weren't designed for the heavier ammunition types such as bombs upward of about 500 kg if you wanted maximum manoeuvrability, but the four on the fuselage could be loaded with heavier ammunition (or auxiliary fuel tanks if internal space ran out) without hampering much and it could hold a lot more stuff in the internal bay.

* * *

><p>AN: The testing date for the F-4 Phantom is in fact accurate to our history, just by the way, or so says my mini weaponry picture encyclopedia. It can in fact carry over 7 tons of ammunition.

* * *

><p><em>Central Europe, Summer 1958<em>

The war had continued in central Europe as both sides ground each other to scrap. The Allies' momentum was rapidly disappearing in the face of the Soviet tide, but the Soviets were also being exhausted, the masses of conscripts no match against the well-trained troops of the Allies. Shepard's forces, as usual, were employed as shock troops and spearhead forces, thanks to the overwhelming abundance of heavy armour they brought to bear in the form of T-1955 Main Battle Tanks. The private army (now more of a Great Power in the world than a business) was forming the core of the high morale of the Allied forces and smashing down the morale of the Soviets regularly. On the other hand, the Soviets' morale was such that only fear for the lives of their families prevented men from deserting en masse to defect. The combat loss ratio was at least three to one in favour of the Allies, even though the SI troops were no longer in battle constantly, due to the need of restoring their armoured strength to what it used to be.

They couldn't afford too many T-1955s lost given the fact that they could only be manufactured in dedicated Heavy Assembly Lines back in Canada. The War Factories they deployed in the field worked for assembly of pre-packaged parts, but those parts had to be made somewhere… The quality of vehicles assembled in the War Factories tended to be inferior to that of vehicles assembled in regular factories, though assembly was faster and they were easier to transport to the battlefield in the form of crates as opposed to whole vehicles. However, Hannah was not approving of inferior quality in her best armoured forces, the T-1955s, so they were shipped pre-assembled. T-1945 parts and crates on the other hand were available for assembly in War Factories to replace losses. Another big thing was that reported losses of too many T-1955s could result in a reduction of the morale of the Allies given that the appearance of the big machines in numbers on the field was considered a symbol of the power of the Allies.

If it was any other army, tank losses could be covered up with relative ease, but SI insisted on a lot more disclosure among its various units, and it disclosed much information to its allies. It wasn't interested in seeming strong so much as actually being strong, and this was actually found to be beneficial to morale of allies, as they knew you were being honest to them and would tell them if you detected anything suspicious. To quote one US Army Colonel who would prefer to remain unnamed for the safety of his career, "They're infinitely more reliable than our intelligence services, that's for sure. Oh, and they at least tell you 'hey, if at all possible, don't blow up this base sitting on the short road, go around it, we want to do something' as opposed to 'follow this illogical long route and try not to get killed, and don't ask questions'." This won them a LOT of popularity among the soldiers, though not so much among the generals and intelligence services.

Obviously, the latter had sensible concerns about operational secrecy, as explained during training to SI troops in their doctrine books, and hence details of operations tended not to be released on more important operations. Instead of lying outright to their allies, though, it was usually a matter of telling them "everyone else stand back and take a break, we'll deal with this whole operational area". That would be before promptly flooding the operational area with heavy-armour-dominated combined arms forces, artillery and air support. Even now in World War Three, it was still heavy armour-dominated combined arms, but rocket artillery and assault choppers had been added to the mix since the first days of SI's military arm operations, twenty years ago.

Most of the old veterans had risen in the ranks, been discharged with injury or death benefits, or retired by now, but Hannah and Jane held on, looking just as they did back when they first opened their business, twenty-seven years ago as just a firearms manufacturer. Only an occasional flash of something in their eyes ever expressed pride at their accomplishments or fatigue at the labour of blazing their way up through a world unused to strong, independent women. But they and their company stood firm in the face of everything the world threw at them, and with the recent rumblings of adopting a new Canadian flag, the Red Maple Leaf with Bars was rapidly outstripping every competitor in the polls. It would be interesting if that happened, but that was irrelevant for now as the Third World War demanded all of Hannah and Jane's focus and there wasn't much time for propaganda unrelated to the war effort.

The tide was slowly shifting in central Europe as the Allies pushed further east, reaching the centerline of Germany by June 15, fortifying the border with Denmark just as the Soviets dug in on their own side of the lines. In Italy, the Soviets were being crushed into a pocket against the Adriatic, centered near Ortona, though they still held Rome (which was under siege day and night and an open insurrection was raging inside the city). Hannah really, at this period in time, wanted to head down there and participate in the siege, especially as nothing else really important was happening. However, she concluded it wouldn't look good on her reputation to order a 24-hour maximized artillery bombardment of certain parts of Rome i.e. the one part that hampered scientific progress for centuries. That was also not very important to the war effort for her.

Unfortunately for the common people, as a final gesture of defiance, the Soviets blew up every building in the Vatican as Allied forces, after 20 days of house-to-house fighting, approached it in the evening of June 27, 1958. This would have some far-reaching consequences many years down the road as the ruling and working classes clash again and again. That winter, Hannah's journal/log said "It only made the fat, rich overlords throw a tantrum and scrape more from the oppressed to feed their own overwhelmingly obese wallets with. They only scraped more together to rebuild their precious facilities while their victims common people huddle for warmth in the winter of '58-'59 and tried not to starve to death among the rubble of the ruined city." But that is relatively minor and beside the point as the Soviet presence west of the Ortona pocket was stamped out in the last days of June.

SI had shifted much of its forces away from the Denmark and Eastern Germany lines, and pushed south against the Soviet salient that occupied Austria and intruded upon northern Italy slightly. Perhaps pushed was not a good term, hammered would have been a more accurate description. They infiltrated (if such a thing was even possible with thousands of Main Battle Tanks) the Soviet lines stretching east from just south of the Fulda region by a detour into the former Czech Republic, carefully avoiding smashing any Soviet units there except a couple of very small outposts that were too in the way for anything else to be done. Then they hit the Soviet forces in Austria from the northeast, where the Soviets weren't expecting anything. For obvious reasons, having about 6000 very hostile tanks appearing on your rear/right flank is typically horrible for the survival and morale of any military unit.

By July 1, 1958, the Soviet units trapped in Austria and northeast Italy were thoroughly surrounded and, after a good pounding, offered terms of surrender by the Allies. After a couple hours—during which many political officers were shot—they accepted, surprisingly, quite a few of the political officers, after defecting to the sensible side, had survived to surrender. The Ortona pocket on the other hand was trying to pull a Dunkirk despite not having enough surface warships to cover ANYTHING (they only had subs and transports). They were offered surrender terms once per day, usually after another batch of field-assembled transports were sunk by Arrow or assault chopper strikes. Still they did not surrender, and popular consensus was that if they insisted on dying… no one could save them from themselves.

Endless battles raged over Europe, while all was quiet on the Middle Eastern Front… for good reason, as even the Soviets were beginning to feel the drain caused by so many casualties inflicted over only a couple years' time…

* * *

><p>AN: I'm going to speed things up a bit so that we can get to the counterculture movement and the War On Terror in time for a good reflection on current-day society, its gaping flaws and hidden-in-plain-sight mechanisms before ACTA, TPP and others make it all illegal. Look around for HR 347, and you'll understand what the line from Revenge of the Sith meant: **"And this is how democracy dies… to thunderous applause."**

Now, a one-word hint to my other series that is currently on hold: Cybranitar.

Anyhow, now that the hint's done, I'm going to take note of a few things: The Asari as a species I think was actually based on the Bioware guys playing too much Legend of Zelda and realizing blue skin with head modifications is highly appealing, though they didn't seem to like the fin bands very much. Then, to disguise their Zora tendencies, they made the Collectors have the same head shape… right down to having four eyes (though the positioning is a bit off on the Collectors).

I was playing Pokémon White the other day, and I was so annoyed trying to catch Zekrom… my Froslass at level 54 was sort of instant-killing it with Ice Beam sometimes… and that doesn't count as a capture, plus the first time I only used one Ultra Ball before deciding to try KO-ing it instead. Anyhow, when I fought Reshiram with Zekrom, I was using only Dragon breath, and the flames seemed to be coming out of Zekrom's crotch, LMFAO. Nice of N to heal and rearm your Pokémon before you fight him, I say, and after, before fighting Ghetsis too. It's too bad you can't just make one of your Pokémon decapitate him or something. Sure, people are free to believe, but to force that belief on others the way Ghetsis is (N is also a victim, but as you will see Hannah doing sometimes in the future, and this sort of brings World War Six, sometimes the only help you can extend is a merciful bullet or fuel-air bomb)… sounds like the US today, right?

My only regret while reading "**The Siege of Shanxi**" By **Made Nightwing** was that I had a human race too used to millions of casualties to go ape shit over it and annihilate another species they could have crushed with a few days of work, less if you assign more than ten percent of the military to do it. This somewhat older timeline, on the other hand… we'll be a lot less lopsided, and a lot more vicious because no one is sure who is going to come out on top.

Anyways, I think I managed to accelerate the reading of the stalemate stage of the war to a tolerable level and make it slow enough to work properly…

REVIEW!


	7. A Left Turn

A/N: Lost guy on lost planet, the preliminary timeline plan is posted at the end of Chapter 10 of SI Archives Part 1: A New Tomorrow. Battle in Stalingrad? Maybe. Also, expect the Rout of Moscow to happen at one point… i.e. the Winter of 1959.

About ME 2 and 3, did anyone notice (I looked at the Wiki) that the **Arc Projector** and **Arc Pistol** ARE **TESLA WEAPONS**? Maybe joining this timeline with ME is a great idea after all. Sure, Tali will try to do something like what Liara did in a different universe much later, but she won't quite succeed…

I will not get ME 3 for a LONG time, thanks to the endings. Not even if I can mod it so that Tali gets a different, better photo (I almost had an aneurysm with the first time a friend told me about how bad it was, then I saw it and thought "not as bad as he made it out to be"). Not a bad manipulation, but they could have used more damned effort, such as the fingers fitting better with her 3D render where they are spaced further apart and thicker than humans' first 2 fingers. I am definitely finding a sex simulator software when I'm finally legal age and using its face/body modding capabilities to make clear what I will have MY Tali look like. For now, just remember lavender skin, blue/teal hair and pointed ears, though nowhere as absurdly long as Blizzard's night elves (which are exaggerations as shown in my planned WOW fics), and 5 digits per limb now that she's gone back to a levo-amino metabolism from the Forerunners' contingency plan. Don't worry, I will not post anything on DeviantArt that could get me booted, which means no porn (and that's about it), but it will be clear what sort of face I think she should have. I am SO glad I saved Rael in my SupCom series… so that Tali has bigger problems to deal with like her father's attitude (hate how he was SO a cameo character, so I'll let him stew on how much he hates his daughter's chosen man for being Cybran). Also, in THIS timeline, when we get there, Tali also has bigger problems, in the form of… you'll see. I won't tell before the relevant chapters unless I know the Dictators are coming after me and the secrets of the plot will never get out otherwise.

I just found out about the American Legislative Exchange Council… corporations buying laws directly and legally. Gee, back in Communist China you had to at least go through the back door to do that without outrage from the rest of the Communist Party of China. That says something.

* * *

><p>Chapter 7: A Left Turn<p>

Archivists' Note: We would have liked to call this chapter "A Sinister Turn" but the Generalissimo reminded us that it may violate certain copyrights still held by Blizzard Entertainment. That was not good given our strained relationship with the Global Dictators' Initiative… uh, Global Defence Initiative over everything from very old copyright laws to citizens' privacy. Upon examination of organic chemistry, we found that sinister means left in Latin, ergo… this… abomination of a chapter title (other than the fact that the Allied armies did turn left multiple times in this chapter). Interestingly, we did not ever feel the need to name the last chapter "Whispers of Doom", no, that is reserved for something in the future. Even if we are fired for using the same name as a campaign mission from StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty we will see that chapter's title through… we are rambling aren't we? Apologies…

* * *

><p><em>Bornholm Island, Denmark, July 17-20, 1958<em>

"You sure about this, Tanya?" Hannah questioned, reading over the report she had of the new intelligence on the Iron Curtain project. Supposedly, some reports associated with the project had been traced to the island.

"Yes, I'm sure, Soviet submarines have the area under lockdown, but we need that intelligence. I hear we're going to have new torpedoes available?

"Yep, seeking torpedoes, 600mm ones, we managed to modify the carriers to suit the F-1958 a bit ahead of schedule, so expect a few of them to be available to air-drop the 600mm torpedoes at the Soviet subs before our fleet enters the area."

It had been a hard job making the Arrows work off the Medium Carriers and Light Carriers, but after modifications to the former, everything had worked out. As for the Light Carriers, it would be a couple more months before they could be fully re-tooled to accommodate the Arrows. That was another big reason the heavy fighters had taken a long time relative to other SI planes to design, their deceleration and acceleration properties were geared for a carrier plane, far more demanding than for a high-end but land-based jet fighter. They could handily outperform the MiG-15 and even outdo the new MiG reported in sightings lately, the MiG-21. The speed was marginally lower than the F-104 Star fighter the US had recently pulled out of its ass, but that thing had such poor reliability that pissing in the engine beforehand would probably kill the plane. The Star fighter was also, comparatively, light, simple, and minimalist. The ejection system was abysmal compared to the Arrow's, as it fired down instead of up, and the weapon load-out was… best not to get into that, it makes us Archivists seem egotistical or something. We will compare the two planes at a later date.

Recently, the Soviets had removed self-destruct mechanisms from their buildings, due to a painful lesson on the banks of the Oder River when entire Soviet bases were blown up by infiltrations of ConYard buildings and the detonation of the self-destruct charges for the whole of the bases. Therefore, there was really nothing the Soviets could do to destroy the Radar Domes the Allies wanted to commandeer for their information storages, assuming the Allies overwhelmed the Soviet bases in a single sweep. As they wanted to establish a second battle front in Denmark behind the Tesla Coil wall the Soviets put up at the southern border of the country, they needed to bring in MCVs. Three MCV-1956s were deployed to the field, alongside a division of SI troops, to establish the beachhead and initial bases while the Allies followed up to expand the landing zone.

After the Arrows torpedoed three subs to the bottom in the waters near the island around noon on July 19, 1958, the ships of a Supply Flotilla began to enter the area, freighters and Destroyer in the lead, trading torpedoes with the Soviet subs and enduring the counterattacks, what few they failed to out-manoeuvre (the Soviet seeking torpedoes were very bad…), with their skirt armour. Fortunately, there were only a few subs involved, so only one freighter received a minor hole (despite using skirt armour, sometimes ships still received a little damage, though if there were too many torpedoes…) from the unguided torpedoes of the subs. With the stand-off space, most parts of a freighter hull could endure most torpedoes and Destroyer hulls were, with stand-off, totally impervious given that the main hull armour was near battleship levels (thinner but stronger per thickness/mass than current mainstream battleship material). For some reason, ceramic composite armour was STILL an SI-exclusive technology given everyone else was going for cheaper, less durable but faster-to-build technologies. Considering how slow generals were in picking up the tank as the main weapon of war after WWI, it was almost surprising how slow (over 10 years now) they were realizing that tank armour was NOT made obsolete by HEAT weaponry, not in the least. Of course, if one believed history repeated itself and ignorance lasted forever… Hannah could almost understand the problem with American, British and French tank choices.

Almost was the keyword there, for obvious reasons.

Regardless, the brief artillery bombardment of the landing zone concluded with the Corvettes turning around and backing toward the beach until their landing prongs hit the beach and their back doors opened. To prevent the ships from running aground or damaging their rudders (which are after the propellers), two prongs had been installed since 1956 that were mounted on the hull, fitted with magnetic sensors and hydrophones (only on near-hull parts for obvious reasons), on either side of the propeller/rudder array. They were structurally reinforced enough that they could work as anchors. They would make backing into a beach at low speeds (under 10 knots or roughly 20 km/h) non-damaging to the crew, the rudders or the hull. On the other hand, they were NOT designed structurally for ramming, at any real speed, anything more solid than a beach of pebbles and sand. T-1955s rolled down the ramps into the water and onto the beach, and the few anti-tank mines that were left for them to hit only slowed them down a bit thanks to their thick hull armour and four track pods offering redundancy.

Interestingly, the main purging of the enemy submarines around the island was conducted using the old, 20-meter-long little fast-attack boats housed inside the rear bays of most of the frigates (those not dedicated to assault chopper operations) and the Destroyer. These were too shallow in draft and too nimble for the subs to target with their own torpedoes with any sort of reliability, while they were armed with the same 600mm seeking torpedoes that could reliably take down the subs. They had to rely on instructions relayed from their mother ship to get close enough to subs for their own short-ranged sonar and magnetic sensors to pick up the targets, but once that was done and the torpedoes were loosed on wire-guidance with terminal seeking the Soviets were forced to begin putting out noisemakers and manoeuvring to minimize their own sonar profiles instead of launching attacks with their own almost-unguided torpedoes against the SI warships. If Stalin hadn't insisted on using exclusively subs in the Soviet Navy, failed to research a decent seeking torpedo and the F-1958 hadn't secured total air superiority for the Allies, maybe they would have stood a better chance, but as things stood presently, it was a bit of a joke of a battle considering any subs surfacing to use their guns on the little boats would immediately be dispatched by the guns on the Corvettes, Frigates or Destroyer. The latter two types represented overkill, while a pair of 100mm shells from the Corvettes was just about right to mortally wound a sub…

After crushing the Soviet submarine patrols and sending many tanks and APCs ashore, along with three MCV-1956s, base assembly started pretty fast. By the time the Corvettes finished assembling the temporary piers from scratch and basically concrete bricks and the freighters were done unloading the about 750 tanks that made up a division's heavy armour strength plus all the APCs, trucks and other vehicles, the landing zone resembled a tent city. A few big sheds i.e. War Factories and a number of power plants were also around, along with plenty of clear space for moving things around and motor pooling. The outer perimeter was dotted with turrets and camouflaged pillboxes by the time Thirteenth Division was ready to move out, an hour after the initial landings.

It was yet another classic case of overwhelming localized force achieving a quick and decisive breakthrough. Of course, that was against the main Soviet base, a nearby radar dome had been captured mere minutes into the landing by APCs and a handful of tanks to assess the data within and its connections with the Iron Curtain Program. The data had quickly been relayed back to Allied HQ via secure channels, and the division was given free reign to level the main Soviet base in the area however they wanted. And they did… after sending all the intel back to HQ by secure channels.

* * *

><p><em>Allied European HQ, July 20, 1958<em>

"Now that you've had a night to analyze this information, Professor, what do you think?" Von Esling asked Einstein.

"This is a most interesting device, this 'Iron Curtain', it seems to function by remotely feeding a huge amount of power into specially-installed capacitors on a vehicle. These capacitors then project an energy matrix between the emitters installed on the vehicle and over the contiguous surface, well, the network of metal atoms connected to the emitters, really, that allow them to partly negate and redistribute energy inputs with absurd ease. Of course the amount of energy in the capacitors is limited and it, along with the emitter system, will melt down and basically self-destruct the technologies if needed to maintain secrecy, but overall I'd say this would be a very powerful weapon…"

"So what exactly does (this Soviet device/the Iron Curtain) do?" Stavros and Carville asked as one, Hannah and Gunter shared a glance, both had a bad feeling where Einstein was going…

"Well, it seems that it will make a vehicle fitted with it… very durable."

"If this were a comic book, I would face-plant at that" Carville muttered as he rolled his eyes.

In the meantime, Stavros was saying "A lot of vehicles are very durable already, Professor, what effect precisely will the device have?"

"It can negate part of an incoming attack's energy and distribute the rest over the entire surface of the field, still directed into the field, does that sound about right, Professor?" Gunter stated quietly.

"Exactly, although these physics formulas are complex, that is what it seems to do."

Gunter's expression turned into an ugly grimace "Fit this device on all the even somewhat armoured parts of a tank and unless you send a round down the gun barrel it's almost impervious to regular ammunition. Perhaps a nuclear weapon could break through?"

Einstein nodded "The magnitude of the experimental capacitors and their charging apparatus are not yet sufficient to fit more than one vehicle at a time with this, nor to withstand a nuclear weapon at close range. Even with a single vehicle being fed power from the installation, it requires some time to recharge the original installation. Power input is limited to not damage the huge rapid-discharge super-capacitors on the building, so I would estimate one use per fifty minutes is the maximum use rate if the Soviets don't want to blow themselves up half the time. However, I would advise against using nuclear weapons against vehicles shielded by the Iron Curtain, the residual radiation levels are too dangerous for combined-arms operations or unarmoured operations. Your armour could take it given your refits to filters and shielding, Generalissimo and Supreme Commander, but all other forces will be unable to enter, let alone operate in, the fallout area with even a modicum of safety unless they undergo extensive refits or wait at least several weeks with current nuclear weapons technology."

"One use per fifty minutes… that's a lot more than we can afford to let our enemy have, one vehicle near invulnerability unless we hit it enough to slag its hull completely…" Hannah shook her head morosely "We must end the war quickly before the Soviets can bring too many of these damned things online. Professor, is there any chance you can produce a device for us of similar principles and power?"

"This is the fruit of many years, perhaps even decades, of Soviet research, it would require me, working with your most competent teams" Everyone knew exactly which "you" Einstein was referring to "a bare minimum of five years to even come close, starting with only the principles of the Iron Curtain. It will be expensive, as there are so many smaller capacitors to fit onto the vehicles compared to the big ones on the installation, and requires some time to modify the vehicles for the system before it can be used effectively."

Gunter let out a long sigh "Then we will have to end this quickly and mercilessly. The Ortona pocket must be eliminated as soon as possible, Carville, give me an ETA after lunch. Stavros, the assault on Austria is bogging down, don't let it, move some of the reserve formations up to the front and pair them up with front-line units of Central and Southern European forces to get experience and wisdom so they can cut their losses as much as possible. Duke," That was the British guy "Prepare to move the British Expeditionary force units into Yugoslavia starting two days from now. Leclerc," that was the Frenchman "Bring the French formations further east from where they are now and take over the entire circumvallation in eastern Germany."

Carville cracked his knuckles and grinned, "Got it, Gunter, it's time for some payback."

Everyone knew what the German and SI forces would be doing…

* * *

><p>Archivists' Note: To bring readers more up-to-date on current affairs, well, then-affairs in the world, and so that some of the more unsightly parts of then-society (dragon's teeth next to rivers to block vehicles from falling in) are explained, we will include some of the interaction between Hannah and Jane over world affairs at home and throughout SI Client States. Interestingly, General Edmund Duke was later known to have voiced the character of the same name when the video game StarCraft and its expansion Brood War were released in the late 1980s, after the Psychic Dominator DisasterWar and before World War Five.

* * *

><p>AN (AUTHOR'S Note): This is written assuming the same long yellow buses used today were in use even in the 50s.

* * *

><p>Well, they didn't know that Hannah was going to read mail from home at lunch, but that was beside the point…<p>

"Jane won the day again, as expected." Hannah commented to herself.

Gunter looked up from his lunch "I would think you would take more time to enjoy the food, considering the rations you have to eat every day while out on campaign. Don't get me wrong, they're good and nutritious, and they don't slack on vegetables or fruits, but still it has to get a bit tedious after over two decades of eating the stuff on and off. What's Jane pulled off this time?"

Hannah snorted in a most unladylike fashion "She managed to wrangle the Canadian government into funding a school bus safety initiative, installing more escape hatches than one of our Protected Vans." Incidentally, the latter vehicle type (a glorified, widened mini-bus type platform) had recently been nicknamed the "Batmobile" for being usually matte black painted, flattened, angular, and having more than twice as many escape "hatches" as doors. It had two doors, one on either side of the front, versus five hatches, two on the floor, two on the ceiling, and one in the rear "New bus design the government's agreed to have us modify the current buses to has only half the windows per bus compared to before, with windows sliding back to open, but ALL the windows can be popped to serve as escape hatches with two levers per window. There's also two big hatches on the roof and two on the belly, plus the door at the back and the regular-use door at the front. Structural integrity's been boosted greatly and crumple zones have been installed around all the edges of the vehicle's frame. Similar stuff is being done for snowmobiles, but as an interim, roads near bridges are having dragon's teeth installed either along the road or along the river bank to prevent more disasters like the one in Kentucky on February 28 this year. A lot of kids and the driver drowned that day… because the bus plunged into a river after hitting another vehicle."

"Oh…" there wasn't much Gunter could say without being offensive regarding installation of concrete pyramids along rivers, pyramids which were traditionally used to slow down tanks "How's everything else coming along?"

"Production's being maintained, though our budget is a bit strained, North Korea's doing great, much better than its southern neighbour, considering we've been building up their own industries and their ability to sustain themselves. A few new manned mines have been opened over there for a more consistent yield than the battlefield ore shafts we use these days. Everything's okay, I guess, Algeria's doing well, the Libyans seem to scared to get frisky, and the progress were making in industrializing and improving the quality of life there is good. We've opened another ammunition plant there to help the war effort in Europe as much as possible… Palestine's holding against the Soviets in that sector, and they've managed to throw them out of Iraq too. I'd say that the Iron Curtain is a sign of Stalin growing ever more desperate for something to tip the ever-mounting odds stacked against him."

After lunch, everyone dispersed to do their own thing until the evening meeting. Carville reported that Ortona if needed could be dealt with permanently within the week, though it was likely to be abandoned by the Soviets as soon as they realized the Allies were making the rescue effort not worth the cost. Stavros had ordered seventeen divisions currently in reserves into Austria to push the front further and into Hungary and the Czech Republic. Duke had started the movement of British forces from southern Germany toward Austria and eastern Italy so that they could assault Yugoslavia and then Greece. Leclerc had been ordering remaining unoccupied French forces to move around the circumvallation around Berlin and the countryside south of it to take over the German sector. Most of the offensive Wehrmacht forces were being concentrated due east of that area preparing ostensibly for an assault due east over the Oder into Poland in one week's time. Allied troops were currently smashing Denmark or rather the Soviet presence in it to dust and echoes. As for Shepard, well…

* * *

><p><em>European Theatre, Late July to Early August, 1958<em>

SI had eight essentially full-strength divisions in Europe. Most Allied analysts (read: those knowing their stuff) rated that equal in effectiveness to at the bare minimum eight Soviet Tank Armies based on tank counts (always roughly 750 per Division versus between 600-800 per Tank Army) alone. If one factored in everything else, including swarming Soviet infantry, other armoured vehicles (APCs), artillery support, and most importantly _quality of tanks_, the minimum any analyst dared state was equivalence to roughly twelve Soviet tank Armies. That wasn't even counting air superiority, which was firmly commanded by the Arrow (F-1958) and thus allowed HA-1957s to wreak absolute havoc on Soviet columns. This was despite the best efforts of Quad Cannon escorts, which were usually taken care of beforehand by a few ambushing tanks or APCs which then retreated to allowed the choppers to have free reign.

This meant that the Allies could deploy a relatively covert (less people being moved) but vastly overwhelming strike force against any one part of the Soviet line at a time. The Soviets' only edge was the fact that they could theoretically advance along the entire front at once, while their opponents had to focus their thrusts. Unfortunately, stupid Soviet tactics and the dismissal of good commanders for minor setbacks, plus the huge body count suffered thus far, meant that the Soviet Union was in no shape to immediately mount a major offensive other than using sheer hordes. As seen on the banks of the Oder, near the middle of the German-Polish border, on July 28, 1958, that did not bode well. Hey, at least they were smart enough to launch it from an area with a wall of Tesla Coils and artillery protecting to stave off a massive armoured counteroffensive, it so their rout wasn't too unsalvageable and the Wehrmacht stopped chasing them at the banks of the river after killing several tens of thousands of Soviet conscripts by machine-guns, aerial bombardment, artillery, tank guns, dozer blades or plain old tank treads.

The Allies bludgeoned their way through Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic while doing the same to Yugoslavia. Armies marching north from Turkish-occupied Iraq began driving the Soviets back toward the Caucasus, and on all fronts the Soviet Union was losing ground, even in Norway and Sweden… It was obvious to all that the Soviets had bitten off more than they could chew, and it was also obvious to all that the largest instrument on which the Bear had chipped its tooth was the T-1955 Main Battle Tank. Mao had outright refused to help Stalin in his quest to conquer the world, seeing him as a rival. However, there were also other reasons. Among the only things preventing a war with China from being on the objectives list of the Allies given the escalating tensions in Vietnam and the Tibet and Taiwan issues was SI's blockading of the proposal. Mao and China were smart enough to know that waging war against the rest of the world was currently untenable for China right now and that their only ally in the West would be turned into the enemy, thus pitting China against the entire industrialized world, a battle they were woefully under-prepared for.

Well, it seemed they were prepared enough to put down the CIA-mediated revolt in Tibet starting on July 31. SI's secret documents released decades later proved the CIA had shipped weapons, ammunition and training to the remnants of the local nobility and spurred them to revolt. They were to try to take the same land China had owned since 1271 if the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty was counted and since 1368 if only the Ming dynasty was counted, however this was all a ploy to distract China from potentially aiding the USSR with manpower and resources. Unfortunately, thanks to a certain Intelligence Agency's utter incomprehension of Asian mindsets at the time, they had no idea how bad Chinese relations were with Russia, dating all the way back to when the "Eight-Nation Alliance" plundered Beijing back in 1900. Japan had been the largest Warship and Army contributor (Britain had 1st place in Marines, Japan 3rd in that after Germany), Russia had been the second largest in all three respects.

That was Mao's biggest excuse for not intervening with the war, especially now that Russia (few Chinese at the time understood the distinction between Russia and the USSR) was losing. The other excuse was that the same faction (SI) that had beaten the shit out of the bully which had trampled China for a century—Japan— and was a friend of China was one of those they would be fighting if they joined the Soviets. Interestingly, he decided to neglect the atrocities committed by _Allied_ countries back when China was semi-colonized. On December 14, 1900, a French newspaper (which Hannah still held a copy of and had treated with a solid base to preserve from acid degradation) had quoted a soldier's statement: "We are open to the Church from the North palace, the priests go with us, ... they encourage us murder, robbery, robbing ... we are doing for the priests. We were ordered to do whatever we want in the city for three days, kill if want to kill, take if want to take, and the actual looting of the eight days." (Archivists' Note: Horrible translation, we know, but we posted it on Wikipedia nonetheless, the truth must get out.) England, Germany, France, the US, and others had all been part of the Eight-Nation Alliance.

Anyhow, the Tibetan uprising was quickly decimated and put down by local Tibetan militia forces who did not wish to again have overlords who would boil their daughters alive for kicks. Heavy, unbearable taxation, absolute power to the rich and powerful, and cruel tortures and punishments for nothing whatsoever had characterized the life of the commoner under the rule of the "monks". They would not stand for it coming again. Interestingly, an SI spec ops squad entering the area under pretence of being foreign reporters (SI was among the few groups allowed access to China for media purposes, as they liked to do blunt truths, most of which turned out favourably for the Communist Party) had exactly NOTHING to do but actually behave as reporters. The Tibetans themselves were taking care of their problems

To quote Jane Shepard after she watched TV footage in August of the young man who was the Dalai Lama condemning the destruction of the rebels over US news channels "Kid was too young when he got the job, otherwise, they would have either disposed of him if his soul couldn't handle their cruelty and callousness, or he would have become one of those oppressors that give humans in general a bad name. Neither outcome would have been good, which is why we under the banner of Shepard Independents firmly approve of the Mainland Chinese government's crushing of the revolt of the once-rich and powerful, the same way as we applaud the French Revolution that is in the history of Europe."

Interestingly, the Canadian people loved them, but the government feared them since Canada was basically a client state to a company that had grown too vastly powerful for them to have any hope of controlling, a company that could destroy the Canadian government within minutes, well before any sort of aid from the US could arrive, if attacked. Hell, they probably had numerous squads around Parliament, plus at least one stationed in each riding as a deterrent… or at least that's what the government thought. In reality, they didn't station units nearly so regularly throughout the country. Another thing was that any politician against SI was basically committing political suicide given the approval rating of said company, which had brought nothing but jobs, wealth, and knowledge to the masses. This was in addition to disaster relief, environmental efforts, and low tax rates relative to the other countries' war taxes simply as they were efficient about spending, unlike your average country's military. Popular consensus was that if either of the Shepard sisters ever ran for Prime Minister, as long as they put halfway decent candidates in enough ridings to matter, it would not be so much an election as a landslide.

* * *

><p><em>Central Europe, Late Summer-Winter 1958<em>

Most interestingly, the Wehrmacht sat there and did nothing but clean its weapons, check its hardware, eat, drink, sleep, go to the bathroom, etc. for half a month after being gathered up, to the point where Carville actually asked Gunter what he was doing. The 49-year-old German had smirked and the somewhat younger Ben Carville had rolled his eyes in sudden understanding of the Supreme Commander's general idea.

Sure enough, while Stavros' forces were heading north in the Czech Republic toward the German border to squeeze the Soviets into a salient near former Dresden, Gunter gave a two word order: "Go South." And the Wehrmacht sliced the salient off within four hours of him giving the order before turning east and thundering east into southern Poland.

One day after that, with most of the Soviet mobile forces in Poland distracted to the south, Hannah Shepard moved her own forces away from the Wittstock area (about 100km northwest of Berlin) to the north. As soon as they left the vicinity of the city, they headed east-southeast under cover of darkness and slammed into the Soviet lines on the Oder river about 60 km northeast of Berlin, where the river bent twice in a sort of salient. The Soviets had been fortifying the areas north of the salient, and south of it near Frankfurt, but since Hannah Shepard was known to not hit obvious targets, they did not fortify the salient any further than they already had.

Big mistake. Although ten Arrows were lost, they managed to neutralize all the radars patched into the SAM batteries and some of the batteries, and this allowed the assault helicopters to drop off infantry with mortars, using them to quickly set off chain reactions among the flimsy launch vehicles and the exposed missiles. As soon as that was done the choppers flew in closer and fired off their rockets en masse before running from dwindling Quad Cannon fire (T-1955s emerging from the transport barges crossing the river dealt with that). Three were lost to a pair of scrambled MiG-15s before a chopper nailed one and an APC got the other with anti-air missiles and blew them out of the sky, while the others wrecked the two MiG-21s and multiple MiG-15s still on the ground on a nearby airstrip. The Arrows had left after expending all ammunition, not expecting an airfield in the area, they had just strafed the hangars as best they could before leaving, hence there had been a conspicuous lack of air superiority cover for a moment.

The Soviets blew up an oil tank farm as they retreated in a scorched earth strategy, which was surprising given they were routing badly. Hannah didn't expect them to have time to employ strategy, and she didn't care given her vehicles had enough extra fuel canisters to cross Poland and return to Germany, not even counting the supply trucks. Pontoon bridges were being brought in so that back-up, mostly infantry-dominated, formations of Allied troops could consolidate the bridgehead and occupy parts of Poland while her armour spread out and rampaged through the country. The Reds had expected her to hammer the Berlin pocket first given where her troops were (only 80 kilometres from the pocket). They were sorely mistaken, and paid the price for it too, though she too stung a bit from underestimating the Communists just a little, but not nearly enough to turn the tide, or rather tsunami…

For now, the split was four divisions per direction, sweeping north and south to crush the Soviet armies guarding the border one by one (thus preventing the enemy from summoning overwhelming forces) while two US armies were moved across the Oder, in addition to a single French Tank Army which could be spared from the shrinking encirclement around Berlin. Some Allied troops commented, according to the _Globe and Mail_, that "The offensive stages of this war often feel like just following after Shepard's troops with a lot of trucks' worth of body bags ready to clean up after them. There's the occasional defence against some feeble enemy counterattack that's already been thoroughly slagged by their assault choppers and Arrow fighters, but that's once in a blue moon. Herding larger armies' worth of prisoners is more frequent for us troops assigned to follow Shepard's men around."

It remained that day for several weeks as Soviet Armies were encircled and neutralized one at a time. Rather north of Legnica, Wehrmacht troops and SI troops met after squashing another Army-class Soviet unit to paste between them. It was quickly decided that Tenth through Thirteenth Divisions would head north-northeast and blaze into Warsaw via Poznan and then Lodz while the much larger Wehrmacht continued pushing east across the hilly terrain of southern Poland to the Vistula and then fortify and move northeast along it until they were near Radom. Sixth through Ninth Divisions, currently northeast of Szczecin and on the Baltic coast, would hack their way through the hills in north-western Poland to Bydgoszcz and then head east across the Vistula and southeast to meet the other branch of the assault at Warsaw, destroying everything along their path. Once Allied forces following them had fully caught up and entered the fortifications they'd prepared, they would head north and wipe out all resistance along the Baltic coast of Poland.

We do not need to state how that plan went or how the subsequent battles went, suffice it to say that by September 30, 1958, Poland was free. However, something else had cropped up…

"Cod War." Hannah deadpanned. "They could not find a less epic name? I don't know, maybe something proportionate to the seriousness of this political squabbling, which is just about zero?"

Gunter sighed "Hannah, it IS serious, the Icelanders have a critical role in the GIUK Gap monitoring line. And now that they are in a dispute with one of the main Allied factions…" He glared at Duke, who shrugged helplessly.

"Don't look at me, I'm just the messenger, this thing's been going since September first, in case you didn't notice, I was only supposed to tell you now considering negotiations haven't given any results thus far."

"I have only one question." Hannah stated calmly "How much are the Icelanders asking for?"

"Expansion of their exclusive fishery zone from four nautical miles to twelve nautical miles."

Hannah blinked "That's how many kilometres?"

Duke suddenly wished he hadn't landed this job, even more than he'd wished so at the beginning of this damned war "From seven point four to twenty-two point two."

"And how far can the _Dawn_ fire its main battery?"

"The… _Dawn_?"

"Hell, the _Mist_ works too because it's the older of the two warships. You know, the _Yamato_-class battleships?"

"Oh, well, they ARE the most powerful battleships by far, but I do not know their range, sorry."

"42 kilometres, the Icelanders are asking for barely over half the range of the world's longest-range battleship's GUNS, not even missiles, GUNS, and you're protesting it. Is there a point to this or is this whole dispute begun by Soviet infiltrators in Britain goading you to fight Iceland and create a rift between us? Every country can define its territorial waters how it likes, for the sake of defending itself from naval bombardment by terrorists, I mean, I could put my two battleships or even any of my other ship types out in the High Seas and bombard Iceland from that range, I think it is reasonable to let them expand the range a bit so they at least have a better chance of catching smugglers, if nothing else. I shouldn't deal with your internal affairs, but make sure it doesn't affect the war effort, will you?

Unfortunately, the British would use that as an excuse to send warships into the area to "protect" their trawlers, since food was important for the war effort, and so was patrolling the GIUK Gap. Later on, in the bitter conflicts over the Grand Banks and Antarctic waters, Hannah would remember this travesty and how it was handled…

The Allies would dig in for the winter, and thus Hannah found herself will little to nothing to really do… Hey, wait, did Guinea just declare independence from France? Hmm… Seven days after the declaration, on October 9, 1958, Guinea received a proposal of Client State status with SI. Three days later the reply was sent that they didn't want to be a client state of another power they saw as at least partly colonial. Similarly, in late November, French Sudan, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, and Gabon all refused Client State status after declaring independence. Well, it was their loss…

On December 5th Jane's letter said that she would fight for better school (but not religious schools given the Shepards' coordinated campaign against such schools, partly by excluding them from safety requirements and thus increasing the risk of accidents) fire safety regulations and requirements given the death rate at "Our Lady of the Angels" school in Chicago of 90 students and 3 nuns four days ago. Hannah believed this to be a good cause, not only because it was about saving kids (from both fires and very subtly religious education) but also because it would improve their popularity even further. Jane also spoke of the sustained pressure by SI-sponsored activists in the US FINALLY thoroughly outlawing female genital cuttings in the US (long after the strict ban had been steamrolled into law by the sisters in Canada).

Later in December, Hannah tuned in to the Eisenhower broadcast from the world's first communications satellite with a tinge of trepidation. This indicated that the United States could in theory deliver a nuclear warhead from orbit… but she believed it impractical and easy to defeat compared to ballistic missiles, which are harder to track, have a much shorter total flight time (counting "hang time"), etc. That was on the 19th, on the 21st she applauded De Gaulle's election as French President in a rather lackadaisical manner. This was mostly from lack of something she could really do, since winters in the Soviet Union, or even in Poland, were unpredictable enough that in theory offensives could bog down due to cold weather in mere hours and be left vulnerable. Even her own units could be cut off as Allied troops might not be able to hold the line along their path of advance effectively and if supplies couldn't keep up any army would fall eventually.

In January 1959, a few interesting things happened, in addition to skirmishes with the battered Soviet Army, on January 3, Alaska became the 49th US State. Hannah clapped slowly, placidly, and close to sarcastically, before questioning "When's Hawaii going to become a state?" January 4th was even more interesting, as reports arriving in the newspapers on the 6th said, 42 people were killed in a food fight between police and members of a political party of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hannah's opinion was a surprised "If it was just food they threw at each other, what the hell are they eating over there? Javelins?"

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><p>Archivists' Note: No racism intended to those unused to the blunt language SI territories are saturated with. For example, racism is "Black people are stupid" whereas regular statement is "On average, Asians perform better academically than most other ethnic groups thanks to work ethic." In other words, as long as you're not too rude and actually give some sort of reason or explanation for a statementobservation (i.e. "It seems that a lot of the street crimes that they actually bother to report these days are by black males aged around twenty…"), you cannot be accused of racism in SI-held territories. On the other hand, you'd better be ready to be punished for hate crimes if you spray-paint a wall with "Jews are greedy" or "Asian women are sluts". As for bullying in schools, well, there are reasons for Constitution-based laws in SI territory being what they are, fairly loose and simple but also not condoning things.

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><p><em>Winter of 1958-1959<em>

With Castro rising to power in Cuba and the things that went with it, plus the inauguration of De Gaulle as the first President of the French Fifth Republic, things in early to mid-January were rather hectic… along with…

"Women's suffrage." Hannah repeated in disbelief.

"Yes, women's suffrage." Gunter stated simply.

Hannah's eyes nearly bulged "And we can't pressure them into doing the right thing and letting women vote in this referendum to understand what the population REALLY thinks of this… this TRAVESTY? Even Liechtenstein has given women the vote after we gave them a nudge in the right direction."

Von Esling snorted "And so they did, I don't think De Gaulle has forgotten how his election was prevented from being a close race by the power of the female voters… that you pushed to the ballot box only a while ago when they were making the Fifth Republic's Constitution. His support, plus my government's and Britain's, totally tipped the scales. Overall, that's the number 3, 4, 5 and 6 world powers, Britain, SI, France, and Germany, all exerting huge amounts of pressure to bulldoze it through Liechtenstein. However, I doubt Switzerland will be influenced by all of us. I can mobilize my government, and maybe De Gaulle can lend support, but given how many of the big banks are in Switzerland and how every major power minus you put a lot of their money there, even the Soviets, I don't think we can do anything. They're strictly neutral, and the Soviets didn't invade them to any significant degree… we can't force concessions from them without major backlash."

"I know, and that's unfortunate, I just wish we could get the women into the actual damned vote. The one sign of mankind's insecurity, which is constantly disguised by arrogance, is mans' inability to let women hold power in their hands. The same is true of abortions and other such decisions. I might only have a few nukes and a few platforms to deliver them with." At present, modified Arrows seemed by far the most viable option for quickly delivering nuclear ordnance from Canada to America. "But the balance prevents the United States from forcing a brain drain on my homeland or forcing too many concessions from us. Having to authorize sales to non-SI territory organizations of corporations or facilities employing over 500 people in person must be annoying for Jane, but she came up with it to protect Canadian industries. These days with new plants opening up elsewhere, like Algeria and North Korea, for lower-tech hardware such as automobiles, we're prospering even in the middle of a world war. A relationship where both partners need to maintain weapons to use against each other might not be optimal, but it is necessary. Why should men have the option of punching women in the belly to absolve responsibility, and thus risk her life and health too, when women cannot retaliate in kind by not allowing the man's genes into the next generation, in a way that does not threaten her own life? Hell the weapons aren't even equal, like how the US has hundreds of nukes and I only have a handful, since they can obliterate Canada while we can only kill their biggest targets, just like how abortions don't threaten the man's life or health but a punch threatens the woman's… I'm ranting again aren't I?"

Every once in a while, when it was something Hannah Shepard really, REALLY gave a flying fuck about that a) was not something which would piss off whoever she was talking to, b) was not being recorded and c) she actually had time to spare to talk about, she tended to go off on a tangent. Population control—as it was blatantly obvious that overcrowding was the leading cause of wars, roughly tied with greed—via methods other than massacres was one of these things, especially as she still remembered how terrible things had been in Japan a bit over a decade ago. When it was either invasion or nuclear annihilation for Japan, she had chosen to invade, and her hand forced by the arrogance and inability to accept defeat of the Japanese government, her armies had ground tens of millions of people under the treads of Raider II Main Battle Tanks as they steamrolled the country. That had all started with overpopulation, hence she was strongly pro-choice in early-term or medically-required (i.e. ectopic pregnancies or other complications) abortions and supported the use of contraceptives in population control. That being said, she had severe problems with abortions that are not medically needed during the second or third trimesters, stating that it is too hazardous to the mother and that some of the methods used are the stuff of horror films.

Legalizing first-trimester and medically-required abortions in North Korea, Algeria, and Palestine were absurdly easy thanks to the immense popularity she earned in those places for creating jobs, providing services and education, and giving hope to the people. Even though she was only breaking even in terms of financial relationships with Client States and sometimes ran a small loss (large initial losses run during initial industrialization phase made up for by revenue from selling things), it was well worth the power and influence that came with being an icon, a paragon of sorts. In Canada, thanks to reactionary elements who did not understand the number-one cause (or at least excuse) for wars, mostly Catholic Quebecers, the law had to be put on the back burner…

But that and most other issues became relatively moot when the outcome of the Swiss referendum came out. The press release statement from her across SI-controlled territories was "Due to the astounding lack of self-confidence and fear of women among the men of Switzerland, the referendum of February 1, 1959, voted almost exclusively on by men with few districts even 'allowing' women to vote, resulted in Swiss women being denied the right to vote. This is a right which is according to the SI Constitution inherent to all adult persons." Later in the text, it said "He who fears giving power to others is a small man, afraid of what might happen should he lose any bit of his oh-so-precious control, a man without enough self-confidence to be able to gladly share the power. He is much as the cowardly ruling class of ages past refused to share power with the 'commoners' who they tried to think of as inferior in an attempt to boost their own egos. The same is true of men who vote against giving women the vote, they do it out of arrogance, insecurity, and egotism, nothing more, nothing less. Real men are not afraid of sharing the fruits of life, real men would not refuse their mothers, wives and daughters the respect, the power that they deserve." Hannah had worded it specifically to appeal to the masses (outside Switzerland), since public opinion mattered more than almost anything in politics, especially as they couldn't censor her given how many channels she owned and how many backroom contacts she had to disseminate information.

Switzerland wasn't Allied anyhow, so it was irrelevant what it tried to do in response. If it tried freezing or touching Allied assets, since it couldn't touch SI directly (SI kept its money itself thank you very much) Carville had said that President Eisenhower authorized threatening them into submission. That issue blew over quickly though… and the Swiss couldn't do a damned thing in return other than tell Hannah she had better not try to take out a loan there.

February 6 saw the first intercontinental missile tested from the US at Cape Canaveral. This was of course alarming news, but Hannah told Jane that they didn't need to start designing a purpose-built anti-ballistic missile yet, since the Us was unlikely to launch any first-generation nukes unless really pushed. Besides, the US needed to build silos first, and just the no doubt paranoid command and control system would take quite a few years to fully assemble.

Mid-February saw a blizzard in Newfoundland that resulted in numerous Corvettes being dispatched with V-HT-1956 utility helicopters (the installation of the giant lift in the stern compartment was proving useful for a lot more than just moving cargo around…) to airlift supplies to the towns along Newfoundland's long coastline.

The spring thaw resulted in everything bogging down for a few weeks, well, the SI columns wouldn't have bogged down if they relied on the APCs for supply, but it would be hard for the other Allies to keep up. This was one of the few times when Hannah wished she had a larger army capable of holding the line better against infiltration attempts… Ah well, as they couldn't go anywhere, other interesting things that happened in March had the better half of Hannah's spare time and attention for the month, such as the Barbie doll debuting. ("What the flying fuck is the appeal of a doll which is anorexic and would snap in half if it was a real woman? I might have annoyingly exaggerated curves (read: tits) but at least my waist isn't a toothpick!") There was another Tibetan uprising, and the Dalai Lama had to flee Tibet given the commoners the rulers had once brutally oppressed were hunting for his blood. ("Good riddance, now if only he'd frozen to death in the mountains instead of being granted asylum in India…" Hannah had been to Tibet before the Communists took it, and her opinion based on her observations was that it was even more brutal than Nazi Germany had ever been.) Hawaii became a state ("Given the strategic value of Pearl Harbour it was about time…")

There were other matters, such as the SI-Canadian co-funded work on the St. Lawrence Seaway nearing completion. The Canadian government had initially wanted to make it a joint Canadian-US project, but after a media campaign appealing to Canada's sense of national pride, gained by the disproportionate success of its (well, SI's, but to the average Canadian there was no difference) military in the field, Jane had won the second party position. SI was to many Canadians already a central facet of Canadian national identity, so the Canadian sense of nationalism quite simply stated that if Canada could do it on its own then it WOULD do it on its own. Ottawa came around pretty quickly once it realized that a Canadian-only project would allow them to tax US freight passing through between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of St. Lawrence (part of the North Atlantic to those who don't know).

Well, now that the thaw was nearing its end, it was time for the final act of the Third World War to begin… or so the Allies, Hannah Shepard included, thought. They were wrong, very wrong, the war wasn't even two-thirds done yet… and the worst was far from over.

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><p>AN: Soviet Armies and Tank Armies then were what are corps-sized units now, just saying, the analysts' conclusions aren't THAT insane.

I am aware that I basically pulled the earliest technology (damage distributors) in the evolutionary line to structural integrity fields out of my ass, but remember that this universe's timeline is NOT THE SAME as the SupCom series timeline! Over there, damage distribution technology was not invented until many decades into the Infinite War. Expect many SupCom references to be made by Hannah once the games come out in this timeline, and especially after she critiques the GDI Defence Crawler. ("Moves on 4 pods, check, has shield bubble, check, has 4 artillery batteries, check, moves slowly, check, produces units, check, all we need to add is a much flatter shape, change the wheels for tracks, add a couple weak AA guns, make the artillery batteries more impressive, and add refuel and repair for air units to make it a total rip-off. Now, this, THIS is what a better rip-off of the Fatboy looks like!" She then gestures grandly at her own faction's Defence Crawler, just being introduced)

Lichtenstein in our timeline did not give women the vote until 1984, but with overwhelming Allied armies all over the area and political pressure exerted on it by number 3, 4, 5 AND 6 of the Great Powers…

Just found out about the From Ashes DLC, I saw that coming form about a million light years away, thank you very much, and I will have only one solution to the Eden Prime missions in ME 3… Of course, the story will be different in the C&C timeline you are reading right now, quite different, for example, there will be no Seraphim around for the last Prothean to yell at for roughly two hours (taking drinks in between, and going to the bathroom too, though he waited until Seth had to go and went with him so he could continue ranting from the next stall over) over abandoning ship (or rather universe) during the Prothean-Reaper War.

I also found the hard way that though ME is only M-rated, 17 years is not an adequate age to view the website, WTF? Anyhow, I will rage about the stupid Ardat-Yakshi explanation BioWare gave at a later point in time, they don't even make as much sense as I did! Also, the BioWare Social Networks isn't accepting my EA account, which is annoying, every time I log in and try to click on anything they sign me out automatically…?

**ME 3 PLANS/THINGS:** After reading on the Wiki, I have decided that they (read: previous Tali) in THIS timeline will summon the power **Redemption** (you should be immediately having alarm bells in your hand as to what old-Tali needs to **be** to have access to this power…) on the corpse of Henry Lawson (right after both Shepards shoot him without a second thought) just so that the Shepards can put him through more proper paces of painful termination without endangering others.

**ME3 Endings:** Does anyone, and I mean ANYONE, own a tactical nuke I can drop on BioWare? The endings are all terrible, search "Cybran ending supreme commander" on Google or YouTube and you'll see just how damned lazy BioWare was. The Citadel basically functions as the petals of Black Sun except there are 5 instead of 8. Also, the races are trapped, really? Bullshit, you can get from one system to the next without a relay (dump core charge there, or just use a Tesla strike on a meteor to neutralize it if it's a negative charge), and it's possible to build new ones (the Conduit for example) so why are they trapped? **CHOOSE DESTROY! THE WHOLE THING WAS A LIE BY AN INDOCTRINATION ATTEMPT!** (And of course BioWare wanting to make a Mass Effect 4 or DLCs to milk us for more money as per EA's way of doing shit, the shitty way.) I agree with the second of the videos below:

**TWO MUST-WATCH VIDEOS:**

**For LULZ:** http: (double forward slash) www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=_qYm738hq1o

**Explains ME3 Endings:** http: (double forward slash) www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=ynYgr1rqEec

**Nenfaer, I sent you a PM, please respond.**

REVIEW!


	8. We Ride East

A/N: Note that the real Sparrow missile, latest model, is 231 kg and has a max range of 61 kilometres.

Now that Ch 7 has been reviewed by at least one person, I'm putting this up, 9 is ready and 10 (it is an optional chapter, but does explain many things about Hannah's later zealotry regarding women's rights) is in progress.

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><p>Chapter 8: We Ride East<p>

_April, 1959_

The Allied Armies spilled over the Vistula on April 4, 1959 after three days of shelling and bombing. Many allied fighters were lost, but air superiority was maintained. The MiG-21 was outdoing the Star fighter with absurd ease, but was losing badly to the Arrow, so an agreement was quickly struck to have the fighters fly in company, the Star fighters going after MiG-15s and bombers while Arrows engaged the MiG-21s. The fact that the first-generation air-to-air missiles were rather experimental for the American side didn't help their reliability, whereas SI's V-WMA-200-1958A (200 kg, 1958 series) missiles had begun with the tested and proven mid-range N/A-WMA-200-1958A and been modified slightly. SI didn't bother with missile range designators on their missiles, because the mass (and what you get when targeting) said it all, short-range missiles were designed under 150 kg, mid-range missiles between 150 and 400 kg, and long-range missiles were designed to be heavier, not that these were firmly hammered-out boundaries. The maximum range of the aerial model was about 45 kilometres on a good day, though the power and range of the same weight of missile was expected to rise with new technologies over time. The Navy model, having been modified for greater corrosion resistance (even more than was usually demanded for SI products), could only reach about 35 kilometres and the Army model about 38 kilometres. Still, it was very popular on the firearms market, and any surplus missiles were snapped up by Germany almost instantly.

Von Esling was apparently the main Allied guy who understood quality over quantity. The Americans had begun mass-production of their Sparrow missile, a longer-range and rather heavier counterweight to the WMA-200-1958A, but the reliability was… Well, let's put it this way: on average, the first AIM-7 Sparrow model needed about 9 missiles per MiG-21 taken down. The WMA-200-1958A needed two if and only if the targeted pilot was skilled enough to dodge the first one multiple times managed to shoot it down, or the first one malfunctioned somehow. The AIM-9 Sidewinder (introduced 1956) on the other hand was heat-seeking instead of radar-lock like the Sparrow, and was actually reliable in taking down MiGs at relatively close ranges. SI unabashedly copied the idea off the Americans and improved on it, resulting in a dual-guidance air-to-air missile that ended up being the envy of the international arms market but for now was mainly for sale to SI's client states' Self-Defence Forces and its biggest ally, Germany. This was mainly as Germany's military head was once a General in SI's employ.

To quote the German Prime Minister on the matter, "I am REALLY glad General Von Esling got the job of leading the German military after World War Two…"

The air superiority meant that Assault Choppers had free reign over the ground-support role in any locations where Quad Cannons weren't numerous enough to survive their alpha strikes. The US were researching their own dedicated attack helicopters, but that would take some more months to bear field-ready fruit. As for the Assault Choppers' survival rate, it climbed steeply after losing over three dozen in the first week of fighting all along the front. This was because the chopper crews improvised and talked to each other about the improvisations. SOMEONE had the bright idea to bring not only the newer, lighter model of the standard 60mm mortar (same as that issued at platoon level, 1 mortar per platoon, usually truck bed mounted or APC-mounted) as per hasty updates to assault chopper doctrine last year, but also use the rocket pods as artillery. Someone got the bright idea of installing an articulating motor on each wing pylon (in V-shaped lever style) so that the chopper could fire nearly straight down if the pneumatic piston was pushed to its full extension and also fire horizontally (relative to the plane) when the piston was fully contracted. That worked to an extent as it allowed higher-altitude rocket runs and thus lower vulnerability to the Quad Cannons.

However, after losing another dozen choppers in the next week after a day off for modifications while the armoured units kept pushing forward, someone else thought of making a small, H-shaped stand that could fit a manually adjusted mount along it. This would then be used to fit a rocket pod on top of the thing to use as rocket artillery when the choppers were, say, hiding behind a hill and needed some fast, accurate and moderate-power suppression fire to be thrown at the enemy before they could move out. Given the pods had rifled, reload-able tubes, and the rockets had been tested exhaustively for infantryman-operated artillery potential back when they were being introduced, it took exactly one day to put the mounts together from scrap materials lying around and to obtain the firing angle, difference in elevation (from firing location to target) and subsequent range data from Jane after Hannah sent over a priority-one communiqué asking about it.

By the third week into the spring assault, SI forces had long since overrun the Soviets all the way to Minsk, routing thirty-two infantry divisions, eight armoured divisions, and six motorized divisions before an advance of "only" eight Field Divisions. In the meantime, the Soviet armies in the Balkans and Greece were being squashed absolutely flat by US forces built up over the winter. The Central European Allies' forces had liberated Bulgaria and much of Romania and Greece by the time Hannah Shepard's armoured forces swept north and hammered down a couple more Soviet armies in an encirclement stretching all the way to Riga, her flanks covered by advancing elements of the French Army and the Wehrmacht. The British Expeditionary Force was occupied taking the southern route into the Ukraine, ploughing forward through Slovakia and northern Romania, taking time to smash Soviet forces in the Balkans in a pincer movement with the Central European armies. The Turks were, with the help of both SI Middle East Theatre divisions and their aviation brigades' air support (fighters and assault choppers), taking back Turkey one meter at a time.

One after another massive Soviet formations surrendered after being thoroughly cut off and beaten into the ground. One after another, cities capitulated to be surprised by the humane treatment of everyone except NKVD personnel (who were purged with only a few exceptions). The British and Americans fed enough support into Scandinavia that soon Sweden was totally free… then new priorities came around as Hannah was forced to move south and trade places with the Wehrmacht in preparation for the massing Soviet reserves in the Ukraine just north of Kiev.

It was not until May 15 that the Soviets finally were beaten into the ground at Kiev, and by then the Soviets had begun evacuating industrial hardware from Kharkov… It was a threat too large to be ignored even while the Wehrmacht and French armies ground their way northeast as fast as they could in the northern battle lines and the other Allies were dealing with the remnant Soviet forces around the Mediterranean and in Scandinavia. It seemed none of the others honestly wanted to help Hannah in this forced assault battle… this was understandable and strategically sound. The T-1955, nicknamed by the Allies as "THE MBT" or just "MBT" for its truly all-purpose design and heavy armour, was the only Allied vehicle not known to suffer overly severe losses in direct attacks against hardened targets. They really needed to destroy the factories there, sure, Omsk and Chelyabinsk might be important tank factories for the Soviets, but they were far away and thus less immediate threats than these ones closer to the front.

The assault on Kharkov began in the early hours of May 17, 1959, and continued for seven days and nights as roughly 150,000 SI troops (having suffered un-reconstituted casualties from previous battles) bombarded the city and its defenders with a thunderous battery of 864 light howitzers (the few lost to Soviet choppers in past battles were immediately replaced) and 40 rocket artillery pieces. The railroad system was blown to tatters by flights of Arrows and the squadron of strategic bombers that Hannah had managed to convince the Royal Air Force into supporting them with on the first day of the battle. By the time the dust settled and the Soviets finally caved, the city was little more than a sea of rubble, the result of more than 20 million light howitzer shells and two million rockets. More than half of the heavy hardware of the Soviet Union's best production facilities had been destroyed, and even more would have failed to make it out on horseback, by wagon, by anything the Soviets could find, if it had not been for Allied logistics failing to handle the fact that in one day of firing SI's artillery units combined could in theory expend upward of six million shells. In other words, in a week they could, taking turns manning the guns and thus having a slightly lower rate than maximum, have fired up to about 40 million or so shells. Tactically, this meant they ran too low on ammunition to completely rake the city from east to west, driving the Soviets toward the lines of tanks that laid in wait in the west. When one had air superiority and enough numbers to sustain some losses from lucky missiles, Scud missiles and the like were not much of a problem.

However, on June 12, 1959, just as Wehrmacht forces conquered Smolensk, Tanya recovered a Soviet defector, Kosygin, who had been one of Stalin's top scientists. The man told them that in the Ural Mountains laid a weapons plant where nuclear weapons research was occurring… Given the BEF currently being only at Groznyy and the nearest Allied incursion, up from Iran around the Aral sea, being almost 800 kilometres from the Soviet research facility west of Orsk on the Ural river (assuming the defector's data was accurate), that meant there was only one option. Gunter asked Hannah to move her Middle East forces up to the now top-priority front in the Caspian-Aral Gap and prepare to move north at maximum possible speed to take out the facility. Still, the transfer of the units would take two days to complete, in time for Hannah herself to arrive at that front to take command in the final push north.

* * *

><p><em>June 15, 1959<em>

It had taken the column of 1500 T-1955s and their support vehicles, constituting Third and Fourth Field Divisions, two and a half days to reach the front lines, rolling day and night and taking all the diesel they needed from Allied pipelines and stockpiles en route as per their authorization. Filling their tanks one last time, loading extra fuel canisters and food, they followed the newest Allied push across the plains before breaking ahead of the other Allied forces, cutting a huge wake through the Soviet forces and trashing everything they encountered, even the Mammoth Tanks the Soviets had begun to deploy, by sheer weight of numbers if needed. They couldn't stop, couldn't afford to do anything really but barrel along toward the Soviet nuclear research facilities. Hannah's biggest worries were that the Soviets might already have missiles and that the Allies wouldn't keep up well enough to be there for her troops to re-supply before they ran out of gas. Of course, she packed even more extra fuel canisters in APCs compared to her usual doctrine and was expecting to drain as much oil as she could recover from the Soviet base to keep her army going.

Since having 1500 tanks break through your lines and disappear into nowhere is highly unusual, it took the Soviets most of a day to regroup and figure out what the hell was happening. That was too long, in 16 hours the column of tanks and APCs (they left their trucks behind to help the Allied push as much as possible logistically and as transports for the infantry) had managed to cover 750 kilometres of ground, and by the time the Soviets quite realized what was happening 110mm guns were smothering the Mammoth tanks guarding the facility—not that the bigger, tougher tanks didn't take a decent toll on the T-1955s too, the numerical ratio was just too steep—with sabot shells and pushing through by sheer force of numbers. Having brought Tanya with her just in case, Hannah decided to capture everything she could for information… until a short distance away, further up the mountainside, great plumes of smoke rose into the air, topped by long-ranged ballistic missiles on pillars of fire.

"Great, now we'll have do things ourselves." Shepard grumbled as she donned some protective gear and grabbed her Battle Rifle before hopping out the back of her command tank as Tanya did the same from another tank some distance away, even while the soldiers were rounding up Soviet prisoners and salvaging what they could of vehicles.

Breaking into the underground base was abominably easy once they decided to mostly flood the facility with Assault infantry and use rocket launchers to solve every too-sturdy problem they cane across i.e. anything battle rifles or button presses couldn't solve. Still, they managed to get through the building to the controls and deactivate the warheads mere minutes before they would have impacted in the capitals of Europe. For over a century, a warhead and the crater it made on impact with the ground remained in the pavement (for obvious reasons, they removed everything inside the warhead and left only the shell) outside the British Parliament building as a grim testament of how close things came in the Third World War. Similar monuments for the other Allies would have been nice, but the Soviet missiles were inaccurate enough that the other warheads landed in less dramatic spots instead of hitting say the Coliseum, Eiffel Tower, or anything similarly iconic.

They managed to totally destroy the research facility and silos, including looting every document and piece of data storage hardware that could possibly be looted. Fortunately, there was more than enough oil in the Soviets' storages to allow them to run back even with commandeered Soviet trucks and vehicles that they'd stolen from the base tagging along. Three hours after they left, the extra nuke the Soviets had left lying around went off on its timer fuse and levelled the remnants of the base and the silos, in addition to forcing the snow on the mountain to shift enough to fill up the wrecked silos (or rather craters).

* * *

><p><em>Later in June, 1959<em>

The next few days were spent by Hannah transiting back to the European Theatre while Third and Fourth Divisions met up with Allied forces, some of whom were busy salvaging the handful of T-1955s that had been lost in battle during the breakthrough. They would continue the push in central Asia toward the tank factories of Chelyabinsk and Omsk while she rode east from Europe.

Now that they were on Red soil, the Soviets were trading T-55s out of defensive roles for ISU-122 and ISU-152 tank destroyers, in addition to the newly introduced Mammoth Tanks. The 122mm artillery gun mounted on the ISU-122 and the 120mm tank guns of the Mammoth tank needed at least two hits in one spot to punch through a T-1955's flank with HEAT shells or three hits to the glacis in the same general spot (though two hits to the exact same location could break through the glacis if lucky). However, the 152mm gun of the ISU-152 could punch through the rear armour of a T-1955 in a single shot if it hit at the right angle with a HEAT shell. On the other hand, only the Mammoth Tank could withstand the alpha strike of the T-1955 within any tank engagement range. If the 1955 traded for Artillery-HEAT shells, it was in fact capable of elevating its gun high enough to have a reach of up to 25 kilometres thanks to its extremely long barrel and good gun elevation capability. In that respect, it was still true that only the Mammoth tank could withstand its shelling, assuming the T-1955 actually hit its target (not very likely).

The Allies drew up a rather grand battle plan in their headquarters in Berlin on June 23, 1959. The plan consisted of "British Expeditionary Force troops will continue to push north in the Caucasus and east in Scandinavia," they had been mostly pulled out of the Ukraine to the Middle East Theatre's offensive in Central Asia, replaced by American forces "now that the Berlin pocket has surrendered, the French Army needs to move itself up to the front lines here, to Smolensk." Hannah gestured toward the map, pointing out the north-central sector of the front lines, the part nearest to Moscow "The US Army needs to cooperate with the British in the Scandinavian front and continue pushing into the Ukraine to meet up with the British coming up through the Caucasus. The Central European Armies need to stay here," a tap on the map "west of Kursk, just in case the Soviets there try something. The Wehrmacht will circle around Lake Lagoda" her finger drew an arc east of said lake "and bypass Leningrad, it's too much trouble to fight a siege over a strategically unimportant city."

"I'm guessing you'll do something to make sure the Soviets do not use their reserves in Kursk to smash our offensives one by one? Not everyone has armour able to stack up against their tank destroyers and Mammoth tanks when the Reds are out in numbers…" Leclerc said, eyes glued to where the eight Division markers with SI's Red Maple Leaf With Bars logo were sitting, west of the Kursk salient, which was marked with the Soviet markers for 13th, 48th, 40th, 69th, and three unidentified Armies, plus 2nd Tank Army and two unidentified Tank Corps. In Guards units the Soviets had 5th, 6th and 7th Guards Armies, plus two unidentified Guards Tank Armies, at least one Guards Rifles Corps and at least one and a half Corps-sized Guards Tank units or their equivalents. The general idea seemed to be to use the force as a mobile steamroller against any opponents… which meant it had to be eliminated.

"My forces will eliminate them systematically and violently, don't worry about it." She reached out, grabbing the northern icons, representing Sixth through Ninth Divisions, in one hand and Tenth through Thirteenth Divisions in the other. With a gesture she moved them around the salient to fully take up the opposite end of the salient, she had information that out of the secretaries in the room there was at least one Soviet mole, so she made the gesture a bit vague, but the point was clear. It would be a blitzkrieg-style encirclement and "Cauldron Battle" as per the type employed by Shepard and the Germans in World War Two repeatedly, which had yet to fail.

The other commanders also knew that there might have been a mole in the room, so they were curious to why Hannah was so open in her motions and so clear about her plan instead of her usual silence and surprises. They would see soon enough. "Well, the Central European Armies will be there backing you up, Generalissimo." Stavros stated simply. "How about everyone else?"

"Seems like the best plan we have, the least expected casualties, that's for sure." Carville shrugged "You know what you're doing, Shepard, so I won't pry much, you'll pull through, you always do." The rather chubby, balding man grinned and gave Hannah a friendly pat on the back.

"How many men are you going up against?" Edmund Duke seemed to be more concerned for the fate of the Allies' most potent and elite strike force (not counting small commando groups of each faction) than his faith in Hannah could override.

"We estimate the Soviets have about 1.5 million men in combat strength, about 2 million in total strength. They have about 5000 tanks if I'm not very wrong in my information broker dealings, both in combat and total strength. They also have about thirty thousand guns of all types, but they do not have air superiority, so even their new Mi-24 Hinds will not be able to save them now." She wasn't wrong much, the Soviets would have 1,426,352 men, 4938 tanks and 31,415 guns in combat strength when the Battle of Kursk began. Overall, they would have 1,910,361 men and 5,128 tanks, as many men were in non-combat roles and some of the tanks were broken-down. "Against that, I can field a hundred and sixty thousand men, six thousand tanks, a bit over four thousand guns, light mortars and light howitzers all, over a thousand Arrows and about a thousand assault helicopters."

The conference room was silent for quite some time, before Gunter broke the silence "If this was a cartoon, we would have heard a cricket or frog by now. How many artillery brigades do you want to borrow from Stavros, Hannah?" The Greek general, Supreme Commander of the Central European Armies, nodded, indicating his willingness to help however he could.

"None, I just need the Central European Army to be ready to contain breakout attempts by the Soviets by forming a fairly distant glove around the Soviet salient. Twenty kilometres will do." Hannah's grin was getting wider slowly. "Also, if I issue any requests to you on that day regarding support, try to at least consider them."

"In other words, I'm putting all my troops under your beck and call, no problem. Kursk needs to be dealt with." Stavros stated grimly. It was shaping up to be the largest battle in history at least in number of armoured vehicles involved… not even counting Stavros' armies, which only made sure it kept the title for many years to come.

"Do you want any strategic bomber support?" Carville asked.

"If you can spare any, that would be nice, but if you honestly can't, I'm okay with that."

"Well, I have two bomber squadrons available, fitted with B-52s, for support operations."

Hannah nodded "I'll give them tasks when they are needed, thanks Carville. Thirty-two tons per bomber will go a long way."

"Best of luck to you, Shepard." Leclerc stated. The others expressed similar sentiments before the meeting dispersed.

* * *

><p><em>A couple hours later… Shepard's office in the Allied Supreme Command Headquarters<em>

"Are you sure about this crazy plan, Shepard?" Gunter von Esling asked his ex-superior worriedly. "Attacking on a ratio of five defending guns to one assaulting tank is not a recipe for victory, even though you have air support and they don't and you have a slight edge in tank counts and overwhelming quality superiority, even counting the enemy tank destroyers as guns."

"Don't worry about it, Gunter, I have no intention of running my vehicles into the muzzles of enemy guns and fortifications, no, I much prefer to go around them, to the east perhaps."

"I don't know, Shepard, it seems you're sacrificing a lot of your troops so that the Allied advance cannot falter…"

She snorted "I'm not going to lose a single soldier that I don't have to, Gunter, you know that better than anyone."

"Yes… yes I do, well, I'm not going to change your mind, so I'll just leave, maybe let the others waiting outside your door in."

And so the other commanders came to speak with her one by one, though they needn't have done so, Hannah knew EXACTLY what she was going to do, to minimize her own losses while annihilating the last major Soviet strike force in existence and force the Soviet Union onto a full defensive for at least several months. The problem was, could she reconstitute her own forces in those months? She'd already sent a message back in May to Jane to train two divisions' worth of troops starting immediately and to have another division's worth of reservists ready, she only hoped she didn't need that many…

* * *

><p><em>Kursk Area, July 5, 1959<em>

Hannah had moved her troops into positions at the north and south ends of the Soviet salient two days ago, but as dawn came on July 5, the carefully-crafted fortifications of the Soviets saw… an artillery barrage but absolutely nothing else. The pre-ranged artillery markers, the channelling minefields (still useful in at least slowing down T-1955s due to need for dozer blades and thus more drag), and dug-in anti-tank guns all proved absolutely useless. The SI spearhead had struck into the centre of the salient from the west, with an intense half-hour bombardment from SI and Stavros' guns. The B-52s Carville had leased to Hannah for the mission shredded the lines of Tesla Coils deployed along the borders of the salient with carpet bombing. The coordinated artillery tore the SAMs and their radar search sets to scrap before finally rolling forward destroying anything still intact in their way with a rain of shells.

Six thousand T-1955s thundered over the smashed Soviet defences, blowing apart anything that offered resistance, mixed with and followed by thousands of APCs and trucks. The Soviets had focused on reinforcing their flanks too much again, the same mistake they had made at the Oder River, and their opponent assaulted the least expected area of a salient to be attacked, the very center of the front end. Thus the Soviets were mostly caught by surprise as their enemy thundered through their lines. Seventy-five percent of the T-1955s were fitted with flamethrowers and the other quarter with 40mm cannons, so even when they'd broken into the infantry zone of the Soviet forces they were, in addition to their two coaxial machine guns, able to lay down terrible firepower and burn the Soviets out of slit trenches and the like with flaming gasoline. This was one of the big factors that allowed SI tanks starting with the Raider II (T-1945) to operate nearly unescorted, without a horde of supporting infantry, they could simply burn the enemy out and their storage spaces provided lots of space for extra fuel if needed. This time, the flamethrower-fitted tanks only had 150% engine fuel, to make space for flamethrower fuel, and the gun-fitted tanks also devoted some space to storing more ammunition, though theirs was a mix of machine-gun and 40mm rounds.

Despite the fact that by the time the forces penetrated past Kursk and split up to head north and south—the Soviets had NOT prepared entrenchments facing the other way, nor had they pre-ranged their guns the other way—they had already taken twenty percent casualties and fifteen percent vehicular losses, the eight divisions ploughed on in the face of overwhelming numerical superiority. By the time each group had covered two hundred kilometres (100 east, then 100 north/south), sealing off the Soviet forces near Kursk with most of the Red Army troops inside the encirclement badly shaken, trampled, or disorganized, they had lost two and a half divisions' worth of men and materials. But with the Central European Armies flooding into the gap (Stavros understood why Hannah hadn't specified only artillery support from him as soon as he got reports of her units thundering past his forces into the center of the enemy salient) torn into the Soviet defensive network and the Reds' supplies cut off, Hannah only had to sweep west slowly to prevent enemy artillery from taking too much of a toll and keep the east defended.

This was all only possible because the Soviets had expected the normal attack against a salient, an attempt to pinch it off or reduce it from multiple fronts at once, something that had never materialized. Though the final strategic objective was accomplished, all of her divisions were below half strength when the Central European Armies finally forced the surviving Soviets, all 200,000 or so of them, to surrender. Her armies had lost 73,000 killed, 4000 permanently disabled, and 16,000 with minor injuries, but along with the 80,000 dead and 8000 wounded Stavros' forces took, they had managed to eliminate close to two million Soviet personnel from the equation, a kill-to-loss ratio of thirteen to one.

By any standards that weren't insane, it was a victory, but it also meant that Hannah would be in no shape for any sort of offensive until at least late September in terms of personnel. Tank losses were still fairly high despite most of the static Soviet anti-tank guns being dealt with beforehand by bombing, choppers, or outflanking, and that would take months to replace in full. In the interim, they might again have to rely on supplies of T-1945s diverted from the original customer—the Wehrmacht—to fill the gap. They had lost close to sixteen hundred T-1955s in battle with another five hundred salvaged and repaired to functionality. Every single one of the 3900 or so remaining tanks needed repairs and replacement of several armour plates and in almost all cases at least one track pod, and the mass of repairs would take at least a week to deal with. Still, morale was okay since despite their losses the Soviets had lost far, FAR worse, so much so that the Soviets were not expected to be able to stage another pitched defence while the Allies bored into their territory from all sides.

For now, it was a time for SI's numerically puny forces to rest and pick themselves up again after assaulting and breaching an enemy troop concentration on a numerical ratio of one to nine combat strength and one to twelve total strength. They also had to wipe the blood and bits of bodies off their dozer blades and extricate all the bone and flesh fragments from tracks and wheels, as well as clean up the mud and smashed meat that had been caked onto the undercarriages of all the vehicles, but that was beside the point.

* * *

><p><em>Russia, Late Summer-Early Autumn, 1959<em>

The Allies rapidly gained ground in northern Russia after the liberation of Finland, taking Murmansk and Archangel by August 17, unhampered by the ever-thinning Soviet forces. In the south, the Caucasus and Ukrainian advances met up on September 3. In Central Asia, Allied forces reached the foothills of the Ural Mountains by September 19, effectively having tied up all production from Chelyabinsk and Omsk and preventing much more than a trickle of new tanks from entering the Soviet lines around Moscow from those factories.

It was not until October 2, 1959 that SI's eight divisions were back in combat shape, bolstered by reinforcements and having managed to scrap together 600 tanks from the 1600 beyond-repair husks left by the Battle of Kursk. Months of feverish production and T-1955s transferred from lower-priority units like Algeria had brought them back to full strength. For the new recruits, it was time to deal with the Red threat once and for all. For the veterans, it was time for vengeance, for Stalin to pay for his crimes.

October 13 saw the fall of Kaluga, 100 miles southwest of Moscow and despite endless Soviet fortifications, to Shepard's army. Kalinin, 93 miles northwest of Moscow, fell on the same day to Wehrmacht soldiers. Next came Borodino, a bottleneck of main roads of the Soviet Union, 62 miles from Moscow.

This was where Napoleon had been crushed in 1812, Stalin had stationed elite Siberian troops here, equipped with Mammoth tanks and numerous ISU-122 and ISU-152 tank destroyers. It would turn out to be a close combat scenario between the columns of infantry and tanks from the various sides involved. The Central European Armies provided most of the infantry while SI offered most of the tanks. The great clash resulted in significant casualties to the Allies, but their momentum held up.

Piles of secret documents began to be burnt en masse in the Kremlin. Lenin's crystal coffin was also transferred from Red Square to a safe location. 200,000 male Moscow residents were conscripted into the front lines while the women and children of the city were mobilized en masse to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches.

Operation Typhoon, the Allies called the whole operation…

Well, there was a storm alright, just not the sort the Allies wanted or needed.

It rained. Moscow's rainy season was the harbinger of winter. In a single night the poorly made Russian roads became a gigantic quagmire. T-1955s were reduced to top speeds of no more than 10 kilometres per hour, and even then it was only due to their flat-bottomed design allowing them to have a bit of buoyancy in the gigantic bog. T-1945s used by the Wehrmacht didn't experience so many problems as they simply weren't as heavy. Allied Medium and Light Tanks could stay mobile, but still, with truck supply convoys and the like inching along, they all had to slow to a crawl.

The combined might of the Allied armies failed epically against the power of Nature. The hurricane of progress turned into a roll through a swamp. The momentum of the attack disintegrated in the ice-cold rain… This was what Soviet T-55s and ISU-122s had been built for, with wider, more continuous tracks (i.e. no track pods) and a lower weight, they retained their manoeuvrability despite the horrid conditions. Charging down from hills they would hit and run against the heavier Allied armoured units, and the Allies could barely do anything but fix the armour when it took damage and to shoot the Soviets as they ran for the hills.

Despite having prepared enough winter uniforms, the soldiers were still shivering in the torrential rain. Lice and mice spread through the Allied lines quickly, and only good sanitation of drinking water (by boiling) ordered by the higher-ups prevented typhoid and dysentery from breaking out among the ranks. By November first, every road, every settlement, every hill on the way to Moscow was filled with bunkers, trenches, mines, and so on. Every step the Allies took forward was paid for in blood.

With Moscow practically under their noses, the Wehrmacht Tenth Armoured Division, pushing in from the northwest and expected to be the first formation to reach Moscow, was forced to come to a halt. Ammunition and food supplies by land were bogged down and every once in a while T-55s would harass them. All that kept them going at all was air-drops of fuel, food, medicine and ammunition. The 78th Infantry made it to 40 miles of the damned city but could not advance another step, while the motorized divisions were similarly cursing the heavens as they waded through the quagmire northwest of Moscow.

Von Esling had no choice but to order a general halt to all sustained offensive operations across the front while B-52s and other bombers were modified to drop winter uniforms and supplies to the men all along the front. The order went out on October 19, 1959, the same day that Hannah Shepard's heavy armour knocked on Moscow's back yard by beginning an assault on Tula. It took three days before lack of sufficient ammunition (they weren't willing to dig into reserves i.e. go under 75% ammunition stock from the 300% max holdings that they tried their best to start every offensive with) stalled the advance and she ended up pulling back from the city in a tactical retreat while the artillery of both sides continued duelling it out. The Soviets had more guns, yes, but the SI guns fired and moved faster, not to mention had slightly greater range and much more flexibility. Still, the Soviets held the upper hand in artillery, but the Allies still clung tenaciously to air superiority and all the benefits that came with it despite only being able to maintain it over their own assault lines and not over Moscow itself thanks to a critical shortage of airstrips that Allied fighters, be they Sabre, Star or Arrow, could fly from.

On November sixth, the ground finally froze over, vehicular mobility had returned, but the temperature kept dropping, and those troops yet to receive winter uniforms were beginning to feel it. Snow fell endlessly, and the cold seeped into those unfortunate soldiers from all sides. Rail and road transport were cut off within two weeks, vehicles began refusing to start on the first try, and some glassware even cracked, such as some rifle scopes. Even so, the Allies kept pushing forward, especially their central-south and northern forces, SI and Wehrmacht respectively. This was only because they were outfitted with the same hardware and there were resistor-based heater filaments in many parts of the vehicles, in addition to the layered composite armour providing good insulation to begin with. Their vehicle-mounted scopes and the like didn't even risk cracking because of the embedded resistors in the systems keeping the lenses warm enough, and rifle scopes weren't a problem as the infantry mostly operated from vehicles or indoors anyhow.

On November 25, despite ever-growing Soviet resistance, the Allies reached a point only 37 miles from Moscow. The frozen ground was tough enough that dozer blades had difficulty maintaining any sort of speed going through them, hence SI found itself subjected to, against all odds, entrenchments that could not just be ploughed over or dozed aside. Their relative inexperience with this type of combat meant their advance wasn't much faster than the rest of the Allies' movements forward. A Wehrmacht motorized squadron reached the Moscow-Volga canal on November 26, only five miles from the suburbs of Moscow. It seemed that the city's fall was imminent.

Yet on November 27, in two hours the temperature plummeted twenty degrees to minus forty degrees Celsius. Thousands of allied troops, particularly the British and US formations coming up from the south, became casualties of the cold. The Brits and Yanks had met much milder weather than the Wehrmacht, and had decided to focus more on supplies of fuel and ammunition than winter uniforms. It was a bad mistake. The French holding the southern front however got away unscathed as they'd had nothing overly important to ship to their front lines _besides_ winter uniforms.

The fearsome cold had gotten to the point where many machines refused to work. American M14 rifles refused to fire reliably as the triggers and firing pins froze in place, M48s, M41s, and AMX-13s simply refused to start, automatic weapons acted up, and the Allied war machine stumbled as its front-line cogs stopped turning. Even SI troops had to clean their rifles and any exposed, unheated weaponry at least once an hour to keep them working properly, though the flamethrower muzzles required no such maintenance (the temperature would have to drop FAR lower to freeze flamethrower fuel…).

Only now did Marshal Gradenko's counterattack come into play against a sluggish and weakened Allied military. The Red Army's machine-guns had leather jackets, their weapons winter lubricant oils, each soldier was dressed for the cruel weather… The Allies had underestimated the Soviet Union, underestimated how many people its mad dictator was willing to throw into the fire to try to preserve himself. At its darkest hour thus far, Moscow mustered thirty new infantry divisions, six armoured divisions, three motorized divisions and thirty infantry regiments.

Tens of thousands of workers organized themselves into the People's Self-Defence Army, arming themselves with old bolt-action rifles, Molotov cocktails and satchel charges. Those fallen in the line were constantly replaced as they staved off Allied attacks on several villages en route to Moscow. In the city's eastern suburbs, workers assembled ISU-122s, ISU-152s and Mammoth Tanks at alarming rates. Specially designed to accommodate combat in the extreme cold (much as Hannah had tested her tanks in the Yukon), most of the tank destroyers and tanks did not even receive paint jobs before being driven off the assembly line, through the streets and to the western suburbs of the city to engage in its pitched defence.

Truckload after truckload of armed workers rolled through the frozen streets of Moscow to the train stations, which delivered them to the villages north and south of Moscow to resist Allied spearhead forces. Every moving motor vehicle, from civilian trucks, taxis, and even limousines for government officials, were mobilized according to Soviet historians. Allied records universally note that this was excepting Stalin's personal vehicles. Even then, the Allies kept on forcing their way toward the capital, fitting their vehicles with heat exchangers and other such hardware in an effort to keep them functional. When they believed the Soviet reserves were bled dry, more and more of the Red Army appeared defiantly before them.

It had been about a hundred and sixty years since the last winter like this. Hot soup in field kitchens froze into blocks of ice in under two minutes, bricks—for that was their consistency—of butter had to be sawed apart. To chop big slabs of salvaged meat from Soviet farms into smaller pieces, axe handles would crack and eventually splinter with the sheer force required. The incessant cold overwhelmed many of the still unequipped British and American troops, many falling over onto the frozen ground, moaning something along the lines of "I can't take it anymore!" before being taken away by corpsmen. The Red Army and armed civilians kept on being thrown into the front line, bombarding the Allied troops, long since frozen numb, with everything from rocks to tank shells. The Allied offensive was spent, so much so that they were unable to make even one step of progress anymore.

In the evening of December fifth, 1959, the Allies were forced to admit that their forces simply couldn't continue the offensive. Even Hannah Shepard was forced to order her men to dig in as much as they could in the hard, frozen ground. Artillery ammunition was only rarely coming up to the front even with Logistics units working as hard as they could, so it had to be marshalled. The big ammo priorities were machine-gun ammunition, 110mm tank shells, and 40mm auto-cannon rounds. Fuel took up most of the space in the shipments, fuel to stay warm… The T-1955s had been spread throughout the Allied front now and that way they would stay for the winter, providing much-needed reliable defensive firepower delivery against the Soviet armies. Their guns, when elevated enough, functioned as makeshift (but not very rapid-fire as the autoloader only worked at elevations under 25 degrees) self-propelled artillery once equipped with the correct shells, and the extra power that their engines provided while idling provided enough heat that APCs parked nearby didn't need to idle and consume fuel. It also meant those APCs were turned into glorified lunchrooms where soldiers could eat their meals without the food freezing solid before they could finish, but that was one of the many things the vehicles were supposed to do.

The Soviets adopted camouflage colours, white clothes, white weapons… emerging from the snow and raining punishment on the Allies before disappearing like ghosts into the long winter nights of Russia. The Allies fought, bled and froze on Moscow's doorsteps, but when the temperature reached fifty-two degrees Celsius below zero, they simply could not fight on.

Outside Moscow, the Allies took 450,000 casualties, a hundred thousand of which were the result of the bitter cold. Surveying her own battered, retreating troops on January 1, 1960, her sixtieth birthday (though she looked about a third of that age still), Hannah Shepard could do nothing but sigh. "The attack of 1959 on Moscow has failed… we have been routed. For the first time, we have been routed." The war would have to go on for many months before it would all be over, and many more people would die, all of them but a select few dying wholly unnecessary deaths…

In the meantime, Kane relaxed a bit from his plans to leave Moscow quickly and smuggle himself down to the Middle East, it seemed the war wasn't over quite yet. Still, the deranged dictator Stalin was beyond help now, though he still followed Kane's every command easily. There were so many evils out there that the next Guardian had no idea of yet, and Kane would have to educate her one by one of those evils. Yes, there would be many more wars, yes, many billions of innocents would die, but the past had to be maintained. Kane understood now, had understood for millennia, what his purpose was, and he would fulfil it before passing on the Mantle. The Immortals, his kind had been called, well, perhaps they really were immortal. He had seen himself, _HIMSELF_, in stasis waiting for the time after the Great Journey, and that had been after he figured out his destiny. Humanity had a long Journey ahead of it before it would be ready to confront the Great Enemy, that, if nothing else, was certain.

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><p>Archivists' Note: The last paragraph was transcribed from Kane's journals, as well as extracted from an interview with the man himself after the whole business with the "Great Enemy" as he called them was over. The genius-madman-Immortal seemed very relaxed during the interview and content that his successor was taking the Mantle well. According to Kane himself, much to the chagrin of GDI, he was planning to have a quiet retirement and would stay in SI territory until destiny needed him again. GDI wanted to arrest him and put him on trial. SI on the other hand understood his warped plan and the governments under its banner, most of them, issued pardons for Kane. They also pointed out the unethical super-soldier programs the UN conducted and the "ONI War" that had resulted from those experiments and that if Kane was to be put on trial then the whole UN executive body needed to be put on trial too.<p>

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><p>AN: I believe that once this C&C series is done, I'll go back and write the B5 (Andromeda Galaxy) and Milky Way factions colliding in hard contact. The only question is, just which period should it all happen in? I'm leaning toward during Clark's regime, but it could also be near the end of the Minbari War. The _Ascendant Justice_ (retained by the Coalition factions after helping the Neo-Covenant deal with the Loyalists) would be able to dole out some real justice over Earth either way. I can see what will happen to the Psi-Corps… well, actually, what I will do to them. Fry the brains of everyone who was an unrepentant Psi-Cop (basically the top circle) and spirit the rest away to be indoctrinated into a better way, a more peaceful Way… it's the only Way that could have a good chance of bridging the gap and includes a nearly totally Psi-capable environment. Perhaps their children will be able to decide for themselves which faction to live in, but to ensure the first generation's recovery they need to be raised in the Way or at least with significant input from it.

You decide. It will be similar to AlbertG's fics (specifically "A Thin Veneer" versus the series starting with "A Universe Of Change" depending on time frame) but a lot more laid-back in dealing with issues. Often, all you need to make a problem go away permanently is to throw a large enough cloud of Revenants and Geminis or ACU-based armies at it (and unlike FTL-capable warships, the aerospace units can be nanolathed very quickly without overly specialized facilities). Unlike his fics though nanolathing is much better than replicators (what I don't get about Star Trek is why they don't just replicate fleets' worth of starships whenever they need to fight a war). Of course, Psi-Corps will be terminated conclusively in my fics too, they are too evil to be allowed to exist. If you have not read AlbertG's works here on FFN (at least the two series I mentioned, some of his earlier works are a bit…yeah), well, he's the sort of writer I aspire to be one day. His editing, even in the fics I admire most (The two mentioned but also including his first WorldWar cross which inspired me to put something similar but far more lopsided), is at times difficult to read, such as punctuation and sometimes word order being problematic, but that is nitpicking.

Did you know that there is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called Fornax Dwarf? BioWare must have referenced it when making Mass Effect.

REVIEW!


	9. Stalling for Time

A/N: AlbertG's fics, rereading the AUOC series, well, I cannot help but laugh at the line in Ch 2 of "Allies In Blood" that says "Vulcan music had a certain charm if one were attending large numbers of funerals." LOL

The T-1955 versus T-55 match-up is **supposed** to be a bit confusing, I'm just stating that SI has an edge in tank technology and showcasing just how much of a difference a long smoothbore barrel firing sabots, plus heavy composite armour along with an expensive but souped-up diesel engine, makes in combat against tanks designed without those first two points in mind. As for the Iron Curtain, the tank has to be hooked up to the Iron Curtain capacitor before it can be charged, and even then it can only last so long before the effect stops anyhow, which is why the Iron Curtain must be deployed in the operational area, so that the vehicle can actually get where it needs to go before the Curtain Emitters' field cycling timer expires (further cycling would result in overload, probably wrecking the tank, but damage taken and this timer are totally separate things, think Defensive Matrix from StarCraft 1 and 2).

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><p>Chapter 9: Stalling for Time<p>

_Spring, 1960_

With the spring thaw (and while they waited for the water to drain away somewhat) came several things. These included the sending of 3500 American troops to South Vietnam, the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, the first patent for a laser, brutally suppressed South Korean Students' protests against Syngman Rhee, etc. There was also the approval of America's first oral contraceptive, since the world's first approval of oral contraceptives was by SI across all its territories for Enovid back when it was invented and had just passed safety testing. These territories included Canada, Cameroon, Algeria, Palestine, and North Korea as of early 1960, and birth control campaigns had successfully taken root in all of them, mainly pitching to people's fear of war and the fact that wars are begun for resources thanks to overpopulation.

In other news, on May 20, socialist members of the Diet of Japan were abducted en masse by police and the Diet approved a mutual security treaty with the United States to be effective after the war. In other words, if someone attacked Japan, the US would support Japan, as the US got airbases in Japan back for its use.

Finally in the list of major events of the winter and spring was a renewed effort by both sides, the Soviets to push the Allies out, and the Allies to break down the Soviet Union, break into Moscow, and end the stupid war. Oh, and they would end the stupid dictator to boot, but that was rather beside the point (except for Hannah Shepard and Stavros' cases, for them, it was a rather personal war). With the new advance came new problems. The Soviets were getting far too many reinforcements from over the Volga, so they needed to cut the flow off if they were to take Moscow.

Von Esling's solution was simple, elegant, and a bit expensive. French and British forces were to mount an assault on Stalingrad. The French would strike from the southwest and the British the northwest. They were to draw the Soviets into a battle of attrition, using tactics to overcome Soviet hardware, and tie up Soviet reinforcements while the other main columns of the Allied military, German, Central European, SI and US forces attacked Moscow from the northwest, west, southwest and south respectively. However, there was a rumour of a superior version of the Iron Curtain being brought online in Stalingrad, hence British and French forces were ordered to investigate…

They received some nasty surprises as they encountered their first "Curtained" Mammoth Tanks near the Red October Factory and the Stalingrad Tractor Factory. Dozens of Allied Medium Tanks fell to the behemoths before they were plastered with enough artillery and tank shells that their protective fields wore out. Even after that, it required a lot of firepower to punch through the extremely thick armour of the tanks and finally destroy the damned things. A mere hour later, a pair of Curtained T-55s came at the Allies backed by Mammoth tanks in a counterattack mounted by the Soviets to the latest Allied push. It seemed the Soviets had realized that the Iron Curtain was more efficient on the lighter, faster tank relative to the tank's own durability, given the Mammoth Tank required plastering anyways and equipping one with the Iron Curtain was thus cost ineffective.

It took the Allies approximately one day to realize that the Iron Curtain effect would fade over time and thus they learnt to adopt the scheme of "unstoppable force, meet immovable object". In other words, they collapsed buildings on vehicles equipped with the Iron Curtain and left them trapped there while they dealt with the other vehicles in the attacking force and waited for the Iron Curtain to fade before blowing the trapped vehicle to bits with demolitions charges. It took the Soviets (General Chuikov was smarter than your average Soviet commander) approximately three hours to compensate and fully redeploy their forces into a defence until such time that additional forces were available to force the Allies out of the city. The Iron Curtains were used defensively from that point onward.

Given that the Allies could not afford to let the Soviets develop the super-weapon any further, Edmund Duke sent the closest strategic bombers of the Royal Air Force to plaster the areas of the Iron Curtain suspect structures with bombs as soon as they were available from being grounded by a springtime thunderstorm. SOMEONE had forgotten that parking B-52s on a dirt field right after the water from the thaw drained away was a very bad idea whenever it rained (they had to dig the landing gears out of the mud before trying to move the big bombers). Unfortunately, it didn't work, apparently the Allies' intel on what the Iron Curtain should look like was inaccurate and the Soviets took advantage of that. This meant only one thing: They needed to conquer the whole damned city and find what the hell the Iron Curtain really looked like.

The Allied solution was to assemble quick-build gunboats (roughly equivalent to a patrol boat) on the Caspian Sea and blast their way up the Volga. Fortunately, there were none of the tactical missile subs the Germans had run into at Murmansk, so that was not a problem, but the quick-assembly attack subs the Soviets had… they gave the gunboats and quick-assembly Destroyers (basically equivalent to a corvette of the day, and we are NOT talking about the Shepard sisters' idea of a corvette) a headache. The boats were built for quick deployment and built to be light so they could easily be moved up in the form of crates to the quick-deployment shipyards, and thus their armour was… not very heavy. Fortunately, the Soviet quick-deployment attack subs weren't very tough either, it did not require a 600mm or even 450mm torpedo hit to kill one. The depth charges the allied boats were dumping were, for all practical intents and purposes, somewhat oversized grenades, and even those could kill a quick-build Soviet sub given a few good hits. Of course, the subs could sink the Allied boats given a few good hits.

Quick-build "Cruisers", roughly equivalent to a regular frigate, were deployed to clear the river of fortifications and blast their way north, achieving naval superiority on the Volga before the Allied armies transported elements across to conquer and secure the east bank and bottle the Soviet inside the city. In the meantime up north the four other Allied armies did absolutely nothing, and neither did the Soviets, simply because they were waiting for better versions of the Iron Curtain to arrive.

Unfortunately for the Allies, the Soviets in Stalingrad were learning to use their Iron Curtain on Mi-24 Hind assault helicopters (this took a lot of work and improvising on Chuikov's part). The difference between assault and attack choppers were that the former had an infantry/cargo compartment, so they could reload in the field, were multi-purpose, and were easier to refit/update over time, but the latter were more dedicated, typically better armoured, and usually faster since their engines were optimized more for speed than heavy lifting. Still, fitted with the Iron Curtain the Hinds were wreaking ridiculous havoc on the Allies before being shot down or sometimes even flying back to home base before the Curtain could be totally overwhelmed. The deployment model of the Curtain was figure-hugging and thus protected even the exposed rocket pods from hostile fire, which was quite annoying to the Allies trying to throw enough ammunition at the damned things to take them down. Well, the ones that DID get overwhelmed usually didn't fall down, they fell apart due to total overkill, but that was beside the point.

The fiasco had gone on long enough, everyone agreed by the second week, and so they pressed their attack on Stalingrad with the US Armies moved southeast to steamroll the city utterly. It took three days and three nights before the main Soviet defence line crumbled and the two Iron Curtains in the city were destroyed. After destroying all the Soviet resistance that could be sighted, the Allies left the city to its own devices, though they tore down all the Stalin statues in public spectacles and put the videos in TV broadcasts directed toward Moscow. It took almost a week to put down most of the resistance in the city, even accounting for fumigation of the sewers.

The Americans botched that job up since they weren't very experienced with the sedative gases they bought from SI's inventory. They overdosed the Soviets in the sewers badly enough that about twenty percent of those not drowned in the sewer water were dead on or after recovery and ten percent would be comatose for periods of time ranging from one to three days. The Soviets hadn't been able to get gas masks as they hadn't felt the gas coming to any significant degree and much of their inventory was destroyed anyhow, so things still worked out to some degree as the sewers were cleared out.

Anyhow, now that the river was cleared and the quick-assembly boats were providing fire support in an advance up the Volga, the time had come to assail Moscow itself. In Central Asia, the Allies were wiping out all remaining Soviet nuclear capability as well as capturing the tank factories of Chelyabinsk and Omsk, thus reducing the armoured reinforcements Moscow could get to effectively nil. Hence Gunter, Hannah and Stavros had full confidence in their ability to break into and take the city, especially as the campaign to take the whole country was going quite well. By June 9, after a one-day lightning encirclement campaign, Moscow had been surrounded and there was nowhere left for Stalin to run. Allied armour thundered toward the city from all directions, led by the heavy T-1955s dozing out safe passages through Soviet minefields. A series of remote detonations however led the columns of tanks to stop and prepare for combat (they were fairly well-sheltered within the trenches already) since the dozer blades had sustained damage and needed patching. Even though they were using three T-1955s per column, with one in the lead and two driving side-by-side after, to ensure redundancy, the Allied tanks following after the big, flattened vehicles were moving two abreast, so bringing the spare blades up would be an infantry job. Fortunately, accounting for that, they had strapped spare dozer blades to the rears of the T-1955s, but that still required crews to get out of the APCs sent with each group and fix the things up.

With the suppression fire the Soviets were laying down, that was not quite possible at the moment. Still the Allied troops managed even though they were being harassed by Hind attack helicopters, costing dozens of casualties but also killing many choppers in the process to surface-to-air missiles and 40mm auto-cannon fire. A few T-1955s were destroyed by plastering and bomb-dropping (in one case, someone crashed his Hind on top of a T-1955), but many more of the regular Allied tanks died under Soviet anti-tank rockets due to their thinner, non-composite armour. The Germans were the only lot almost completely unhindered as their masses of T-1945s all had dozer blades and they were concentrated, ploughing forward whereas SI had to help keep the Central Europeans, Americans, British AND French moving with any sort of reasonable speed.

Counter-battery fire was crisscrossing the sky continuously overhead, determined to smash each other to paste. Wings of Allied strategic bombers roared by high overhead despite Soviet flak and missiles soaring up to stop them (in quite a few cases succeeding). Artillery fire, those not dedicated to plastering Soviet artillery, focused on areas of the city where missile fire was coming from as per the recon planes' reports, and Arrows ran interference for the bombers form MiGs. They couldn't fight the choppers cost-effectively due to the proliferation of flak mounts and SAM sites in the area, but they could still handle escort duty against MiGs with no trouble and thus spare the bombers some trouble. They also helped disperse chaff and flares to throw off the Soviet missile guidance systems, whether radar or thermal, and it worked, more or less.

Two hundred bombers had filled the skies over Moscow. Six thousand tons of bombs had fallen on the city in the first hour of the bombardment and approach phase of the battle. Far below the returning bombers, far below the thin, wispy clouds of the day, thick, oily pillars of smoke were already drifting into the heavens from burning tanks of both sides. The Soviets seemed to pull three more Iron Curtains out of their ass, and they had tried to use them on their MiGs earlier only to find that the planes moved too fast for the field projectors to handle and the Curtain was ineffective on them. They thus had to grind it out against the Allies on close to even terms, which meant a losing battle for the now outnumbered and out-tanked Soviets.

Rockets, artillery, bombs, missiles, and of course plain old cannon fire bombarded the city against any detected threats, blasting the Soviet capital to rubble ever so steadily as the Allies advanced. The Reds fought them for every centimetre of ground, from one room to the next, from one building to the next, from one block to the next, they fought. It took only one day for the Allies to agree on a few things…

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><p><em>Allied Supreme Command Conference, June 10, 1960<em>

"No, we cannot go on like this, it is wasting far too many of our troops. They trust us to bring as many of them home alive and in one piece as we possibly can." Hannah refused Leclerc's suggestion that this was the best way to handle Moscow's urban warfare rather bluntly.

"What do you think should be done, Generalissimo?" Leclerc asked "We can't afford rolling our tanks through the streets with Soviet anti-tank rockets everywhere, we HAVE to clear them out before we can make things work out. Your tankers are lucky that they can endure almost anything and use flamethrowers to clear buildings, but we can't exactly burn the city…"

"I was actually thinking that we SHOULD burn through anything in the city that dares offer resistance and then smash our way into the Kremlin to get Stalin before he can kill himself or completely destroy all the evidence of his crimes. Our assault choppers will lead the way to drop in on the Kremlin while we barrel through the streets to Red Square using appliqué armour to withstand damage."

"That is one way to do it, but what about collateral damage?" Leclerc questioned "At least this current way the civilians have the ability to flee before our advance…"

"Where will they run to, the districts nearest the Kremlin? We are advancing into the city from all sides at once, and to make us cling to the moral high ground, Stalin may well threaten to blow up the inner districts of Moscow once all the refugees are there." No such bombs were ever found afterward, but given the madman, who know what might have been? "He won't have a bomb under the Kremlin due to his paranoia, unfortunately, but we will need to get there quickly to prevent him from incinerating all evidence of his great crimes."

"You make a good point…" Leclerc fell silent, signifying admission of defeat.

"Our new Cobra attack helicopters will support you if you are certain there is nothing better to be done." Carville finally stated after a long silence.

Leclerc sighed and spoke again "My AMX-13s can provide some quick diversionary fire and lure the Soviets into skirmishing, but as French vehicles don't have armour comparable to your tanks or even the M48's plating, despite being able to do damage, we…"

"No, our Centurions will take care of the diversion, your tanks don't have the armour to survive any Soviet hits really." Edmund Duke cut the Frenchman off "No offence intended, but it would be pointless throwing away the lives of your men like that."

Leclerc stared at his British counterpart for just a moment, partly annoyed that the British were stealing the spot of the French, but mostly annoyed that he was right and the French tanks simply weren't adequate and R&D didn't seem to be interested in doing anything but purchasing M48s from the Americans, which were significantly slower than the light, speedy French tanks. The French General sighed again "You're right, Edmund, well, we'll assist in whatever capacity we can then." _though we're mostly infantry due to our economy still not being all that great and R&D not catching up yet._ Leclerc thought bitterly, though he kept that to himself and resolved to put even more pressure on R&D once he got back to France from this war.

"Good, now that we're all coming together for this operation, here's my plan." She pointed at one of the big streets headed to Red Square, across which the Soviets had erected multiple barricades "We will equip fourteen T-1955s to be breaching mod, and have a couple hundred more hardened mod vehicles following immediately thereafter. The street is wide enough to drive four abreast in, so every tank on the outer column will be responsible for burning part of the neighbouring buildings to suppress resistance. They'll target either the lower or higher floors, and they will take turns at it so that no one runs totally out of flamethrower ammunition, APCs will take up the inner lanes near the core of the formation and rearguard-mod T-1955s will bring up the rear."

"What are these mods you speak of?" Duke asked, if it was the obvious…

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><p><em>Chosen Route to Red Square, June 11, 1960<em>

…It WAS the obvious.

It was also painfully slow compared to the usual max speed of the T-1955s which was nearly 75 km/h (and even that only as they were governed to that speed to keep the tracks healthy). They were only thundering along at about 50 kilometres per hour, the maximum speed they could attain now that was good for the tracks given the huge amount of extra armour bolted onto the external mounting points of the vehicles. The breaching mod as it was called involved reinforcing the dozer blade with armour plating and, in this case reassembling the two parts of it to present a straight line angling to one side on the vehicle instead of a V-shape. Half were fitted to divert junk left and half to the right, they were also fitted with a lot more topside composite armour and flank armour.

The hardened mod vehicles were plated more on top, on the sides, and on the rear than standard vehicles, but were similarly slowed by the extra weight of armour. As for the rearguard mod, they had a lot more armour on the back and all sides of the turret than regular vehicles, all the way up to levels equivalent to the normal glacis plate. The mods of the T-1955 could only be safely used in terrain that MCVs could handle, as they'd bog down in some swamps and on muddier riverbanks and probably damage some of the flimsier bridges by crossing now that their mass had increased to something around 130 tons. It also decreased mobility, increased fuel consumption, and made the ride rougher than the unmodded tank, thus reducing accuracy when firing on the move. This meant that the assault helicopters were responsible for taking out most of the targets in back alleys. Fortunately, as the main roads to Red Square had very few gaps between the buildings, this was not too much of a problem.

In the three-kilometre run, a B-52 dumped 32 tons of bombs along the route. The only problem was that the last bomb managed to hit the Kremlin and blast a large hole in part of it, which eventually turned out fortunate as it prevented Stalin from shooting himself. Undaunted, the SI tanks wheeled into and charged through the wide street, shoving everything still ahead forcibly out of the way after destroying them with cannon and flamethrower fire. Flights of HA-1957 assault choppers and Cobras took care of most of the tank-killing as they stormed ahead firing their rocket pods indiscriminately in strafing runs down the street, trying to kill everything not dead from the B-52 run. Still, the T-1955s had to barrel through quite a bit of resistance and crush a significant amount of what was left under their treads. The tanks took turns burning the buildings flanking the road with flaming petrol to suppress Soviet rocket launcher troops.

When they finally reached the Kremlin and met up with the platoons of troops transported there by assault choppers (including to the roof of the building), they immediately established a defence ring before the Allied forces throughout the city began their final push. Gradenko and Nadia had shot themselves and Stalin's last advisor, some guy named Kane according to intelligence reports, was nowhere to be found, the Allied troops at the Kremlin began spreading out inside the Kremlin to secure the building. Nikos Stavros, who was with them, was among the first to find Stalin buried under some rubble. A broad grin spread over the Greek man's face as he looked at the wounded, helpless mad dictator who had wrecked his country.

"Should I leave you here to die? Or would that be too kind?" Stavros mused while watching Stalin groan in pain. "It would be too kind, I'll take you to Hannah Shepard once she gets here, she knows how to serve up real justice to the scum of the earth like you." He grinned viciously and gagged Stalin "Soldiers, get him out and bind him, make sure he doesn't bleed to death before we can hand him off to Shepard for some justice. She'll probably skin him alive and cauterize the wounds, fry his skin, and force-feed it to him before he dies of exposure, just like how he practically skinned the Russian people and put them through the fire." Stavros kicked Stalin in the back of his knees, sending the madman falling on his front with a muffled yelp of pain. "Get up you fucker so that we can kill you properly." He growled before yanking the guy up by his hair and pushing him along, bound and gagged with chains and shackles around his feet.

The Soviets in the city kept on fighting for two days and two nights before finally admitting defeat and surrendering. It then took another five days to bring the fires near Red Square under control before they could devastate the city even further. In the south, General Chuikov surrendered on behalf of the entire Soviet Union. The Third World War seemed to be over…

It wasn't, not really, at least not for Hannah and her troops. The Allied infantrymen unfortunate enough to be tasked with securing the lower basement floors of the Kremlin were busy nursing the prisoners they had found back to health with thin porridge. They had learnt after the deaths of concentration camp inmates after eating too much food all of a sudden that those too weak couldn't handle much food at once. It was this travesty, this secret buried deep within the Kremlin, that brought Hannah Shepard to the point of no return in Stalin's execution. It was a secret that sickened even the most hardened Allied soldiers and even Soviet POWs who had been shown the footage of the dungeons, for there was no other name for them. It was something even more horrid than what happened in the next World War with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was not indiscriminate death as occurred there, but an intensely personal war, at least for Hannah Shepard and her soldiers.

It was a madman's idea of stress relief against an enemy that seemed nigh-unbeatable, extremely intelligent, powerful, attractive, and so on. It was a personal battle with Hannah Shepard, and when she discovered the secret the megalomaniacal animal known as Stalin had under the Kremlin, legend has it that the Kremlin itself quaked with her fury.

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><p><em>Kremlin, June 12, 1960<em>

In the early morning, Allied forces had linked up from the Allied lines and the Kremlin and only pockets of resistance remained within the city. The first thing that Hannah Shepard did when emerging from her command tank an hour after the linkup was ask one of her soldiers waiting at the doors of the Kremlin's underground garage "Is this true?"

He was leading the way down into the garage, the doors had been blown off by Allied troops to expose the truth to the world "Yes, Generalissimo, it is true, they…" the man choked up and shuddered before taking several deep breaths "The horrible screaming… the ones we had to bayonet for mercy… you need to see it to understand, ma'am, and the motherfucker specifically hunted down those with a physical resemblance to… to you."

"So basically black hair, brown eyes, and busty?" Hannah questioned, her voice growing colder with every moment.

"Yes."

"That is enough information, I need to see this for myself…" She stopped short as the door to the dungeon opened "oh my fucking GOD!"

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><p>Archivists' Note: The next chapter may be extremely disturbing to most readers, reader discretion is STRONGLY ADVISED. TO THOSE WHO WANT THE CENSORED ENDING, PLEASE READ ON NOW.<p>

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><p><em>Kremlin, June 20, 1960<em>

Hannah Shepard took a deep breath before starting "Remember, men, the principles of communism, of socialism, have nothing wrong with them. Lenin had a dream that was not so terrible, but this monster, this animal, this thing" She gestured at Stalin or what was left of him "mutated Lenin's ideals beyond all recognition, that was why the Soviet Union became a fascist police state. Do not hate Communism, every social system has its faults, capitalism, socialism, democracy, dictatorships, all of them have their faults, do not hate any idea, hate those who pervert the idea to their own benefits. Evil may rise again and again, but the good people of the world will burn it to ashes every time." She concluded her speech to thunderous applause…

The Third World War… was over.

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><p>Archivists' Note: That part was extremely censored and toned down, to the point of losing its meaning. Suffice it to say that Stalin was given a good long taste of his own accursed medicine before his death. The entire process of his execution, and the full horrors of his secret, will be revealed in the next chapter, if you dare to read it.<p>

**IT IS WORTH NOTING THAT IN SOME COUNTRIES THE PUBLISHED VERSION OF THIS PART OF THE SI ARCHIVES HAD CHAPTER 10 REMOVED BY CENSORS.**

Be warned, the next chapter is extremely disturbing, even to us archivists. While we were writing and revising it, we had to keep vomit bags around. If you choose to read it… may whatever deity (the Force is included in the list of deities) you believe in be with you.

For the record, after the first part of the Archives, we were instructed to be less specific about events unless writing in novel format following the tales of specific persons instead of just tracking historical events. Therefore, readers should take note that events after the first part of the Archives are considerably more vague and only really cover the SI angle of things. The other angles can be found in other history textbooks of other factions. The vagueness also makes the later parts of the Archives considerably shorter than Part 1, other than when it is based on personal accounts and/or written in novel format.

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><p>AN: I am serious, the next chapter is so disturbing that you might not want to read it. It just tells you how monstrous Stalin was, and it provided practice for me writing of brutal deaths, experience I'd rather not have had.

In other news, did you notice that Asari head crests resemble Celebi's head fringe?

**REVIEW and tell me if you want me to post Ch 10 or not!**


	10. In Utter Darkness

A/N: Dear the reviewer who calls himself Chuck Norris: Hannah is keeping up the Immortal reputation for getting things done without turning into a politician. Does Kane come off as a vicious, methodical, and downright bipolar psychopath? YES. Does he save humanity's collective ass with the Tiberium Control Network? YES. Did he basically baby-sit and elevate humanity, not always in ways that are best for people of the time? YES. Are the Shepards unknowingly following in the footsteps of the first Immortal? YES. There is a price to be paid so that one can watch over and guide a race for many millennia after all… a slight amount of mental polarization. **HOW MUCH SHIT HAS HANNAH SEEN ALREADY? DO YOU THINK HER MIND IS INVINCIBLE? IT'S NOT!**

Dear lost guy on lost planet: You brought my attention to some very important points, but I'm here having Stalin so paranoid almost all the good commanders were eliminated through his purges, Timoshenko and Zhukov for example were forced into retirement… they could have fought the Allies to a standstill. Soviet tactics will advance with time through Romanov's USSR through to Cherdenko's USSR and finally concluding with Dasha's Russian Bloc (similar to SI's system but with Russia in the middle whereas SI has Canada, the Bloc is close friends with SI but not direct allies until several years in) toward what you described. I noted that your description seemed to match my idea of how SI operates quite closely… except the logistics levels are sufficient that every tank is DESIGNED with extra stowage space in mind and can have three times as much fuel onboard as the main fuel tanks hold, same sort of thing with ammunition after they figured out that quality and quantity of ammunition decided major tank-on-tank engagements.

This chapter is the result of exploring the Internet's darkest fetish sites for a while, I have done research for many things, none of them pleasant, so IF YOU CANNOT STOMACH GORE, CANNIBALISM, TORTURE, ETC. **LEAVE NOW. Leave and don't come back to read this chapter. IT IS NOT PLOT-CRITICAL, and its events, whenever they are needed at all for the plot, will be explained briefly in any references made to it.**

**You don't need to read this, save yourself while you can! Dark Darius, that goes triple for you, if you had nightmares about Ireland and Japan, you will never sleep again after the Kremlin's Dungeon and the Allies' Justice. It was so bad that the Allied generals handed in resignations before going at Stalin with everything they had, though none of the resignations were approved.**

**If you want to know vaguely what happens without being scarred for life, Hannah speaks about it briefly while venting to Jane in Chapter 2 of Part 4 of the Archives, which is now up. So you can skip this and go over there. NOW.**

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><p>Chapter 10: In Utter Darkness<p>

Archivists' Note: You have been warned that this chapter is not for the weak of heart. It details some of the worst depths men have ever stooped to, and speaks of the hobbies of a lunatic. Reading this chapter is not required for the understanding of SI's history. However, it may well provide an understanding of why Hannah Shepard behaved the way she did during the War On Women as she termed the Sixth World War. When tensions were high between herself and America, sending Bus-mod King Onis and Personal-Land-Vehicle-mod Mecha Tengus (with transformation removed) and Striker VXs (similarly without transformation) from Palestine to support Saudi Arabia's (a major client state of the US) women's liberation movement was among the flashpoints that led to World War Six. Later, during the passing of stupid laws in Idaho and Arizona, Spec Ops campaigns were carried out to terminate the stupidity of the legislatures in those states. No one knows to this day why she did the job so vehemently beyond "doing the right thing", but other historians suggest widely that she had cracked at the end of the Third World War in the events detailed in this chapter and would henceforth view men who treated women as anything less than approximate equals (she agreed that we aren't the same and thus aren't equal per se) as enemies to be eliminated.

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><p><em>Kremlin, June 12, 1960<em>

Hannah Shepard wandered through the rooms in a sort of silent daze, walking in a deadened version of her usual powerful, purposeful stride, eyes half glazed and mental pressure from pure rage increasing steadily as she moved through the rooms of the dungeon. She had seen evil, stared it in the face and laughed—or so she believed—many times. She thought she had brushed them all off, but now it all fell on her again at once, she could not shake it off now, she could not laugh off what she had seen, this war had become far, FAR more personal in the opening of a doorway into secrets that perhaps had better been left hidden.

Later historians would point at this as the time when Hannah Shepard finally cracked for the first time. They claim that she was insane, mad, berserk, after what she had seen in the dungeon. They would, by Hannah's own admission, have been right to make that claim for the days between her discovery and Stalin's death. By popular consensus of everyone from history students to psychology professors, this was entirely understandable, and the Allied Generals had gone too soft on Stalin during his execution.

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><p><em>Kremlin, Afternoon of June 11, 1960<em>

The Allied troops kicked the door open and the point man shot one of the men inside before he could slit a dark-haired woman's throat. The other two caretakers put up their hands and dropped their knives immediately and the Allied soldiers took a real look around the room that wasn't a scan for threats as they fanned out.

Women. Dark-haired white women aged between about eighteen to thirty. They were in cells against one wall, and one, in a cell, was fallen on her side clutching at a still-bleeding bullet wound on her left breast. The nearest caretaker's knees were blown out a second after the Allied soldiers registered this. The female sergeant started and barked "I told you to hold fire at anything that can't and doesn't attack back!" at the backs of some of her troops already advancing into the next rooms. Personally, she was thinking that it would have been better if her subordinate had sandblasted the man after he was taken prisoner. What the hell had Stalin been doing down in this lab-like place?

"What do you do here?" She barked as her troops fanned out to secure the whole room. The caretakers were babbling in Russian "Screw this, medic, make sure that guy lives, we can't do anything for this woman here now…" she had been gesturing at the cell with her weapon and waved at the just-saved girl next "someone help that girl up and call the tanks to deliver some porridge down here from their first aid kits." Those kits had included porridge ever since overeating had killed many concentration camp inmates from kidney failure due to over-intake of protein. Thus porridge had become a critical part of first aid kits.

Gunshots and screams had rang out (along with a shout of "Clear) in the next room "Ma'am, you should see this… Medic! Get a medic!" A soldier said in a shaking, gasping voice, then there was a pause of almost half a minute, with vomiting sounds "I shot that motherfucker in both elbows and knees, he won't be going anywhere, but he just… this girl here…" The soldier gestured to the gagged woman who was strapped to what seemed to be an operating table of sorts that looked more like a dissecting tray than anything else. Then the soldier bowed over the sink again and more splashing of vomit hitting the basin was heard by all. Blood ran freely from a cross shape formed by a deep horizontal slash and a vertical gash in the woman's belly, and her intestines were spilling out, still moving a little and clearly alive.

The sergeant had to suppress the urge to be sick as well as the urge to start shooting at the downed caretaker person's belly and never stop until her clip ran dry "MEDIC! FORGET THAT MAN, GET OVER HERE!"

After less than a minute, the Medic concluded there was nothing he could do and that unless she got to a rear-echelon field hospital within a few minutes the woman would be beyond saving. In the meantime, the sergeant noticed that quite a few slices had actually punctured the woman's intestines and that the medic was trying to prevent too much leakage while he worked to try to sew the dying woman back together again, and that a couple loops had actually been sliced off the main line of the gut completely. When she took out the woman's gag she spat out some bloody mucus before gasping out in Russian one of the few phrases of Russian the soldiers all understood. "Kill me… kill me…"

"How much of a chance does she have?" The sergeant asked the medic, who had stopped trying and was preparing to give the woman a shot of morphine, something which told her enough, but she wanted confirmation. He shook his head sadly and she got the confirmation "Alright… don't give her the shot, we need to save the morphine just in case, got to hold out for at least a day until we can get reinforcements. This is better." She raised her voice "Let it be documented that this woman had to be euthanized on June 11, 1960, and record the time too." She had brought her Battle Rifle up with the barrel and bayonet levelled at the other woman's forehead. "I'm sorry." She whispered before plunging forward and ramming the bayonet through the woman's brain, measures SI troops were told to take when there was enough time available to conserve bullets and a need to conserve medicine. The body shuddered for a moment before finally going still. "Rest in peace…" there were no words left for this…

"You guys with the caretakers, tighten their bindings, I don't care if we have to amputate all their hands and feet afterward to prevent gangrene from killing them. They are not leaving this dungeon alive if the Generalissimo's past sense of justice against rabid animals is anything to go by. We're not quite needed up topside yet for the defence so take care of the prisoners, give them some porridge, can't go poisoning them with too much protein or fat…" She was visibly quite shaken and wiped the flat side of her bayonet over the clothes of the number-four caretaker, the one found murdering the woman she'd just bayoneted, "What will we do with you… We are perfectly within rights to kill you here and now in however painful a fashion I wish, but I'll save to for Generalissimo Shepard, she knows what REAL justice means…" her troops, men and women alike, looked disappointed at that, but they scattered to do their jobs after tightening the bindings on the prisoners.

None of them quite thought that Stalin, to maintain a well-nourished appearance in his "toys", as his diary referred to the women as, actually fed them properly, so a recovery diet was not quite required. They figured this out within a couple days though.

Some of the women, all of whom had the same obvious physical characteristics i.e. dark hair, brown eyes, attractive (or once-attractive) face, and nice curves, were still in one piece but for scars and burn marks, which was a relief to the soldiers, but some of them… The soldiers were awfully glad there were drains in the floor as they spewed up everything they had for lunch and probably parts of their breakfast too. Quite a few were missing limbs, eyes, ears, noses, breasts, and other assorted body parts, but were still alive and were likely to survive. Stalin's hobby was so vile that the caretakers of the dungeon were lynched by the soldiers after they took care of the dungeon's survivors as much as possible. They were beaten to within a centimetre of their lives and then left there while the soldiers explored the dungeon, which looked more and more like a butcher shop, further.

That lynching was even before they discovered the freezer and the room of preserved women. "What the flying fuck was wrong with Stalin and his underdogs?" Someone muttered as they walked through the freezer, looking at the bodies and parts thereof around the U-shaped hallway. Women, some of whom were skinned before being frozen, limbs of women, women sliced in half from head to crotch or in some cases at the waist, body parts ranging from sliced-off breasts to a platter of ten fingers and ten toes… It was at the far end of the freezer that they discovered perhaps the one thing that added some parts to the death of Stalin.

It was the frozen corpse of a young woman looking no older than twenty, but she had been beheaded, her body spitted from vagina to esophagus after gutting (judging by the binding marks and stitches) and stuffing, and it was obvious that she had already been partially carved for meat. Most of the rump roast (according to tags on other "roasts" in the fridge this was what Stalin called it) was missing, as was one of her breasts, the cunt fillet (Stalin's label again), and a portion of thigh. Judging form the look of extreme pain on the dead woman's face, she had been gutted and stuffed while still somewhat alive… "That's it, we're radioing the General for permission to terminate those caretakers" The sergeant stated simply to make sure her troops stayed under control instead of acting of their own initiative, since killing rabid animals wasn't exactly something she could punish them for.

Hannah Shepard's response after hearing their explanation was "Do not terminate them before I can arrive and interrogate them as to the extent of their activities, and capture the interrogation on video. The world must understand the truth, no matter how terrible it is." Her soldiers obeyed that order without question due to how much sense it made.

As for the gallery of preserved corpses, they were even worse…

One victim had charred bits of what seemed to be bamboo rammed under her fingernails and toenails. Her femurs were torn out of her thighs through two open gashes, the radius and ulna on her left arm were ripped out and posed in her left hand during her preservation process, and she was apparently force-fed her own intestines, which had been cut away from her anus and been stuffed into her mouth. Her stomach was rather bloated with how much of the exposed guts—exposed by cutting away the abdominal wall in a large slab, a square-like opening into the woman's innards, an opening held open by the arm bones held in her own left hand—had been stuffed down her throat forcibly. The woman's breasts had been subjected to a board of nails, as evidenced by the small puncture marks all over them, and her ribcage had been spread wide open, her right hand posed to clutch her heart as if to squeeze it. Her legs, the boneless but plasticized thighs, had been spread widely to reveal that her vagina had been cut, the knife having begun at her anus and bisecting her vagina before cutting up into the square hole where her abdominal wall used to be.

Apparently Stalin took altogether too much pleasure in butchering women in various creative ways, because there were a lot of bodies… another one in the gallery had her legs spilt into fifths, with one toe attached to each fifth, with probably the table saw. The ten resulting parts had been posed separately much like the arms of a squid. Her torso looked intact from the front, but from the back the soldiers saw when they turned the rotating pedestal around that the woman's ribcage had been removed along with much of her viscera, so that she was basically two halves held up by her spine and some plasticized skin and muscle on her front side. The tag next to the body, writing by Stalin himself, would, upon translation, reveal that the Dictator had particularly enjoyed the "flavourful" ribs she had provided.

Another "remarkable" (term used extremely loosely) one had the back half of her skull removed along with her brain, which according to the note next to had been absolutely delicious, she had been posed as strangling herself with her own guts. Unlike many of the others, this woman's intestines had a few loops spooled around her legs and arms and were still attached to both her stomach and anus inside her open abdominal cavity.

It seemed Stalin had a fetish for internal organs, because another woman was posed as kissing her own cut-out vulva with her hands cradling her uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. The rest of her viscera had been pulled out through the hole where her cunt once was and were pooling on the floor, still attached to her inside her. The abdomen of the woman was noticeably sunken from the organs being pulled out. Her tongue had also been cut out of her throat (which seemed to have been torn out) and shoved tip-first into her vagina as part of the posing before she was plasticized.

He also seemed to have a fetish for spitting, because quite a few women were spitted, some with gutting complete and the organs out of the picture, some with their guts still dangling from them, and some with no external damage to their torsos. A few of these were found to have had their organs removed through their mouths, vaginas or anuses. Some were posed spitted from anus to mouth, some from vagina to mouth, some (usually ones with a lot of other damage already done to their bodies beforehand) were posed with the spit exiting through the top of their head, and some had parts of their heads or their whole heads cut away, often after spitting judging by the looks of horrific pain on the faces of the women. Stalin didn't seem to like removing any parts of the body from the spit after the impalement, so the parts of the bodies were strung up like kabobs, making it quite different from the spit roasting type of spitting. This was just for Stalin's idea of sport, the madman's sick idea of fun, his entertainment when he was taking breaks from dictating to his yes-men…

… And according to consensus among the unfortunate troops tasked with searching and securing the dungeon, the reason why they really hoped they didn't encounter the dictator and the squad guarding the dictator while going topside. They'd probably start shooting the megalomaniac and never stop until they ran out of bullets. That would be bad for keeping the man alive until Generalissimo Hannah Shepard arrived to dispense her brand righteous justice that would be beyond anything a regular soldier could imagine for the motherfucker who deserved everything he got and more.

Stalin's trophy room also had a rack of plasticized heads and some heads and torsos, comparable to the trophy heads from the later movie _Sin City_ (the movie's script writer said he was inspired by it). This resulted in a numb silence among the troops as they walked around the room checking for hidden Soviets. They found none, but the women in the squad would still be eternally stricken with depressed (some to non-existence) sex drive after the horrors they had just witnessed done by men, well, mostly one man, to over three hundred somewhat-similar-looking women. The men in the squad also got extremely reduced sex drives because they had a hard time looking at nude women without imagining them dead and put on display. These were the thoughts which made the men feel nauseous each time they emerged from whatever mental trash can the men stuffed them into. This perhaps explained why the squad bonded and eventually its members married among themselves, since none of them had much interest in physical relations.

They spoke to other units in the area of this when they sent people topside for supplies and to help in the defence of the Kremlin if needed (they weren't, T-1955s were extremely good at holding the line), but there was no time to show them. Perhaps that was good, because they'd probably spit-roast Stalin in sheer rage. That would have been unfortunate given the treatment Hannah Shepard eventually gave the man, which was far more extreme and actually reached proportions that most of the world declared fully appropriate for the madman's crimes.

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><p>Archivists' Note: We only gave a few examples of the horrors the SI troops encountered, enough to make clear Stalin's madness, but few enough that we were able to stomach describing them.<p>

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><p><em>Kremlin, June 12, 1960<em>

Hannah Shepard's breathing was strained as she worked to keep the nausea at bay "Stalin's gonna pay, motherfucker's gonna pay for this…" she whispered harshly to herself as she slowly edged forward, looking around at the many women who bore passing or sometimes more than passing physical resemblances to her, the few survivors and the many dead, plasticized ones. She, walking past a set of clothes made out of some poor woman's skin, finally found a body that looked amazingly intact with only an expression of torturous pain on the woman's face "What happened to this one?"

"We think she might have been plasticized alive." The soldier leading her on the tour stated quietly in a near-whisper.

"Oh…" Hannah was just as quiet, and she stayed quiet through the whole of the rest of the tour. Her mind kept on conjuring the image of women screaming and straining in their death throes as they were sliced in half on the table saw, women having limbs removed by Stalin with one of the serrated knives she saw on the tools racks. Her mind started a vicious cycle, a feedback loop, according to her rarely-used journal. It was this, according to many other historians, that finally cracked her mind. It was this, according to many historians, that led to her absolutist stance during the Sixth World War regarding the rights of women everywhere, their rights to life, liberty, love and the pursuit (not purchase) of happiness.

"Stalin will get what he deserves for this…" she stated simply, looking at a woman's skin, complete with face and scalp, strung up to cure, the woman's butchered body parts were in the freezer… some of which were already missing thanks to having served as Stalin's food. "I'll need to show all this to the other generals when they get here after we pacify the city, keep the dungeon intact and make sure the survivors are treated well. I need to plan how to execute Stalin in a fashion worthy of his evilness, don't worry, soldiers of Shepard Independents—" they had finally renamed the organization during the 1959-1960 winter when it was determined that Cameroon spending a few months considering client state status was due to its hesitation to, upon independence from French-administered UN trusteeship, submit itself to a BUSINESS. On the other hand, an independent, multinational organization which led an international alliance, Cameroon was fine with joining in name. They were actually fine with joining in reality long before they were ready in name, but after the name change was implemented on January 1, 1960, the same day as Cameroon went independent, the country signed up the very next day. "—and survivors, Stalin will be punished as fitting his crimes. I will ensure it. Translator, tell them that."

After the translator was done and thanks was conveyed from the survivors, Hannah instructed her soldiers some more regarding the treatment of the survivors "We don't have wheelchairs or anything like that available here and now, but make sure they are as comfortable as possible, I'll send you a translator later to help. Also, they seem well-nourished enough" her eyes darkened in anger "thanks to being Stalin's toys, that they can be fed normal food starting either tomorrow or the day after."

"Yes ma'am."

"Oh, and Sergeant? You did well keeping those three caretakers alive, I will need to instruct the other generals on the proper use of knives, chains, razors, salt-blasters, gasoline, ammonia, alcohol, and so on. They will make perfect training dummies." The sergeant shivered a bit at Hannah's voice, and she softened it a bit "they need to be punished for what they did to those women, and bullets are too good for the animals. They will, however, suffer less than their master. Sometimes, and I learned it the hard way, you can only fight fire with fire. We were lucky that bomb hitting the Kremlin knocked Stalin out in the falling rubble, or he would surely have shot himself. He doesn't deserve such a quick and easy death with everything he has done to the world… everything he has done to these women." The translator told the women that too, and was greeted with tired affirmative replies, Hannah continued "They were captured because of some physical resemblance to Stalin's most feared opponent, me, and they were tortured, killed, plasticized, or in some cases eaten because of me…" she shook her head sadly before her eyes blazed brighter with anger "You will be avenged, sisters! When we are done with killing Stalin, you and your families are welcome to immigrate to any of my client states, or even Canada, you _will_ be approved for immigration and receive the same benefits as my soldiers crippled in combat do." She elected not to talk about her turf having true socialism, since these women's opinion of socialism, after the bullshit version the USSR had, was likely low enough to, if measured as a straight-line distance, reach several galaxies over in any direction. "I will see you in a few days' time, and you can have front-row seats to us dealing with Stalin."

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><p><em>Kremlin, Evening of June 19, 1960<em>

After the generals were done putting Moscow back in order and Hannah tired of keeping the little secret in her broken mind, she dragged them all down on the 18th and 19th to check out the dungeon. Needless to say, everyone agreed that Stalin must die in as painful a manner as possible. The dungeons actually led to a unanimous vote in the US House and Senate, in the British, French, German and Canadian Parliaments, and in every other country that was briefed on the situation. Thus she'd managed to get them to fully authorize use of any and all force by the generals without career repercussions. The men would have dealt with the monster anyways, but now they could go all the way with delivering justice. For some reason, she forgot to tell the generals this, but most of them were willing to resign their posts for the delivery of justice anyhow.

"Do I really have to do this?" Edmund Duke whined before Hannah lost her patience and forcibly wrapped the man's fingers around the handle of what was basically a shaving razor mounted across the end of a stick. "I'm not sure about resigning my post for this yet…"

"Just because your country wasn't overrun doesn't mean Stalin doesn't deserve to be tortured to death, Duke, the razor is good for killing him with a thousand paper-cuts. I will take care of his castration and the more painful procedures, you each only have to give him one slice or nice poke, do more only if you want to. Stavros, I understand you want the bamboo sticks for the guy's nails?"

The Greek man nodded gravely, and Hannah gave him a packet of toothpicks "My advice, don't heat them beforehand, that might cauterize the wound too quickly for it to hurt quite enough. soak them in brine for a day or two instead for salt and pain. Of course we'll have to torch his fingers to stop the bleeding, just like everything else to prevent him from dying too quickly…" She turned to her ex-subordinate "Gunter, what do you want to do given the mess he made of Germany… again."

"Anything works for me, ideally including lighting parts of him on fire. I've written my resignation already to the President of Germany."

"Okay, you get to do the honours when it comes time to burn what's left of him. Someone else wanted to use a drill bit on him?"

"Yes, I wanted a jackhammer but realized it does too much too quickly, I'm planning on using an industrial-sized drill bit and twisting it around inside his ass for all the rapes and murders his troops have done at his behest in occupied territories." Tanya Adams glowered at the thought of Stalin's innumerable broadcasts of encouragement to his troops to freely commit war crimes on an unprecedented scale. The man had truly gone berserk after his initial momentum stalled, and now it was time he was on the receiving end for encouraging his troops to rape and pillage whatever. A lot of men had been raped in the ride of the Red menace… which meant that Stalin liked anal violation a bit too much to be spared the treatment.

"Very well, maybe you should consider heating it up and searing the inside of the gaping hole left there after I tear his dick out before you ram it up his ass. It'll give him a taste of what it is like to have one's groin area invaded by a large and unwelcome phallus as he did to all those women in the dungeon at least once." Hannah's teeth were gnashing together in rage by this point.

Von Esling had been exceedingly glad he had brought multiple vomit bags (brown paper bags) with him earlier in the afternoon when he was asked by Hannah to take the tour. The other generals weren't so lucky, though they actually made good use (unlike the caretakers once upon a time) of the drains in the floor and the sinks all over the rooms. All of them were in towering rages by the end of the tour, and/or, in Leclerc and Duke's cases, enraged and with a sense of hopelessness at the sins humanity was capable of. It had been a unanimous decision that Stalin's death had to be via torture and that he would die in the most horrible way they could come up with. After some discussion… they had decided on hardware choices (no ammonia or alcohol as those would poison him, no salt-blaster as it wasn't clear enough to the audience… etc.) so here they were.

"Now guys, let's start practicing, the caretakers are all male, which will help me practice with what I plan to do to Stalin's dick…" she pulled out a thin, round-ended metal rod with a wooden sheath around part of it, basically a probe, from the torture tools the caretakers and Stalin had once used but never would again, she wasn't sure if this was good for stabbing up their urethra, which was why she would test it. "Leclerc, start it."

"Time for some payback…" The Frenchman snarled before applying a cheese grater to the upper arm of one of the caretakers and dragging it until it tore away bloody ribbons of flesh. As the caretaker screamed, Leclerc grabbed a hot pan and applied the bottom to the large but shallow wound in a quick and painful cauterization. "This is for the women you ate after you picked them apart and gave your overlord Stalin the choice cuts…" Leclerc growled before dropping the strips of skin and flesh into the pan, now placed back over one of the smaller heating coils on one of the stoves in the room. The subcutaneous fat would be enough to make sure it didn't burn too badly. "How did I do? Okay? I've already filed my resignation, might as well make what Stalin and these son of a bitches have coming to them count."

"Yes, you gave him a small fraction of what he deserved and what he did to others." Hannah glowered darkly.

Stavros decided to go next, forcing the bound man's hand against the wall before drawing from the pack of toothpicks and ramming two under each of the man's left hand's fingernails, then he did the same for the right hand. The man was screaming and sobbing by now through the gag, but the mercy of a bullet was far too good for the scum of the earth like him. The toothpicks weren't thick enough to always pop off the nail, but it was enough to inflict horrible pain.

Duke went at the man next, adding a long series of quick, shallow slashes to the man's other, undamaged upper arm before pulling back to see just what Hannah Shepard would do. She did something they didn't quite see coming but which didn't lose her too much of their respect since they had all agreed that hell was far too good for these caretakers. She grabbed a torch, lit it and put it aside as she got to work, shredding the man's pants and grabbing his hips to stop his movements dead, she pulled out a slim, sharp filleting knife and with a single quick vertical slice bisected the man's dick lengthwise, leaving both halves attached to his body and bleeding profusely. His eyes rolled up into his head as he fainted from the pain only to be roused seconds later by a small bucket of ice-cold water to the face by Carville. The American had gotten the job of dealing with cold water when required.

The torch went under the bleeding, mutilated appendage and the flesh began to sizzle as the man kept screaming until his voice gave out, the wound being cauterized by the heat and the flesh being roasted even while attached to him. His balls were also being roasted, and once she was content with how done the cooking was Hannah slit the caretaker's scrotum, with a few quick prods with her probe the man's balls were dangling free, only suspended by the cords of the vas deferens and the arteries and veins that sustained the testes. After they seemed cooked enough she cut them free, slashed at them a couple times, cooled them in a bucket of ice water, and stood up to stuff them down the barely lucid man's throat after tearing the gag out. Then she did the same with his penis, tearing it free, and motioned Tanya over with her heated drill bit to finish most of the job before Gunter would get the honours of lighting the petrol they would pour over the man.

Watching the pyre of the first "training dummy" (the caretakers were known more often to history as "antichrists") the generals only had to look back at the surviving women, who had been invited to watch the execution and were cheering fanatically and crying in joy, to understand that they had inflicted far too little pain. None of them lost any sleep after they finished with the training dummies over the killings that night … This was because of the room full of frozen, butchered (sometime cooked) female remains, the room of mutilated, plasticized women, and the handful of permanently damaged survivors. That was enough to keep the other Allied generals up all night long building their simmering hatred of Stalin.

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><p><em>Kremlin, June 20, 1960<em>

The Soviet Union had surrendered around lunchtime and the Soviets in the city had surrendered many days ago, hence Allied troops and Soviet civilians filled Red Square in the evening, waiting for the broadcasts that were to be made beginning at 9 PM. Medics and ambulances were on standby in case people fainted as the lights of the Square and Kremlin dimmed and the projectors lit up…

…and many did faint as the collective horror at Stalin's dungeon reached critical mass by a few minutes into the broadcast. These broadcasts, especially the first twenty minutes covering Stalin's sins, were known for causing a larger death toll than any hurricane that year in the United States due to heart attacks and strokes from sheer horror when they were finally broadcast in a somewhat censored (they only censored parts of the Allied generals' killing of Stalin) edition. This was despite or perhaps because of the huge number of disclaimers, warning and comments put before the full horror of the broadcasts (the best way to make people watch something is to tell them not to). It was also inspiration for many horror and slasher films over the next decades… ranking right up there in inspirational value alongside the Grinders employed by Yuri during the Psychic Dominator Disaster.

Anyhow, when Stalin was finally yanked out with a collar and chain around his fat neck, into the live video feed from the dungeon, the crowd went up in a great roar of rage. The Allied generals standing on either side, however, waited, and when they couldn't hear anything through the open (secret) garage door at the back of the Kremlin, started with reading a list of Stalin's crimes. This took roughly ten minutes to complete, and the sentencing was passed to thunderous cheers as, even during the reading, the camera had been moving around and so had the generals to showcase the collection Stalin had and some of the survivors. Then they let Stalin out of his bindings and let Hannah Shepard at him. "I challenge you, single combat, here and now, you have no weapons but yourself on you, and I have none either, those are the rules, no holds barred." She stated icily, they had made sure Stalin was MOSTLY unarmed beforehand…

Stalin may have known how to be a butcher, but he was useless in hand-to-hand, the first blow that Hannah shot off was an incredibly close feint (hence it was an effective feint). However, Stalin's lack of reaction to what could until the last instant have been an attack indicated it was fast enough he didn't even have time to react to the hand passing over his eye not quite at full extension of the arm (it could easily have nailed him if she wanted). By the time he flinched and tried to punch back he was only a fraction of a second away from a long left to the nose and was toppling backwards before flying somewhat upward in a ballistic trajectory as Hannah's left combat boot met his crotch in a lightning-fast kick that would have probably smashed his genitals if she wasn't being careful to set up for the main event that was to follow after this smack-down. Instead, it just caused him to double over in the air from pain and fall in a crumpled heap against the far wall between the remains of two plasticized women.

She walked over casually, stating in a light but frightening voice "You abducted hundreds of young women who bore some degree of physical resemblance to me, and you tortured them, killed them, ate them, even preserved a lot of them. Well, this time it's the real deal, Stalin, it's you and me now, let's see how well you do." Suddenly he lunged up toward her and she easily sidestepped his attempt at getting her with a knife hidden in his sleeve. She smirked transiently, perfect, they'd left that knife on Stalin so that it would justify whatever she did next to him. This involved a quick kick up the side of the head that tore the madman's left ear off and then the heel of a flat-bottomed combat boot to his back as he passed by on his lunge, sending him rolling as he crashed to the ground.

"The world has had enough of your madness, Stalin, you ate people, played with them, and enslaved them for kicks, it's time for YOU to get a good taste of what it feels like…" She grabbed him by his feet, swung him up, and threw him aside in a display of strength that made all the other generals either raise their eyebrows, duck (for Duke), or both (Carville). The madman hit the floor and rolled to a stop, groaning in pain. Hannah kicked his knife out of his hands and stomped on his hand (bringing a scream) before grabbing him and slamming him against the wall on the X-shaped binding thingy (with wrist and ankle cuffs) that Stalin had used in the past on victims when they were standing up. She quickly shackled Stalin to the wall and stepped back, dusting off her hands. "This X-shaped shackling mechanism was once used by Stalin to torture women, who he referred to in his diary as 'toys', now, it has come full circle and justice will be served." She stated to the camera crew clearly, looking straight at the cameras.

She glanced back at the others "Are you ready? Generals Leclerc, Duke, Carville, Stavros, Von Esling? Are you ready to take vengeance for the hundred-plus million people who died in this war which was started by the megalomania of this small man with dark dreams?" They knew that Stalin's advisor Kane was probably more behind the take-over-the-world part, but Kane was not well-known to the public and had not been recovered, disappearing somehow. They thought it was probably as a result of the Allies' bombing… how wrong they would be. "Are you ready to put him to death for his crimes, mass murder, mass rape, cannibalism, and so on?" She waited for the Russian translation to be complete. It would be edited out of the broadcast and replaced with a suitable translation before it reached other media stations in Europe and elsewhere. The broadcasts would come in tomorrow's evening news in most of the world as it took time to move the tapes, especially across the Atlantic, and they wanted a simultaneous release.

"YES/DA!" The roar from Red Square was loud enough to be clearly audible even over the microphones the media crews were using. They took a moment to explain that this was being broadcast live, with translations available, in Red Square outside the Kremlin at the moment on the recording.

"Let's get started, Stalin, meet the cheese grater, for your armies' shredding of the territories you occupied." Leclerc stated, stalking toward Stalin, cutting off his sleeves with scissors, and grabbing his bare arm to stop it from wriggling around. Then the French General, authorized to do whatever to Stalin by the Allied governments (though not knowing it he had filed his resignation anyhow), pressed the cheese grater to his flesh and tore it downward, bringing a scream from Stalin moments before he was gagged. The Allies had declared Stalin to not have the rights of a human as "a sentient constantly and consistently behaving like a diseased animal must be put down by any means required". No one was quite sure at the time how the proposal made it through the Allied governments, but later Nod documents revealed that Kane had ensured it because he was utterly sickened by what Stalin did to people who simply physically RESEMBLED his enemies. Kane also believed that the other Allied generals hated Stalin enough, and he had prevented the incineration of Stalin's gallery before the Kremlin could be hit by paying people off to ensure this, to tear Stalin to scrap. He was proven right, as he would be proven right in almost everything with good time.

Duke went next, leaving a long series of over three dozen shallow red slits, almost like gill slits, along Stalin's other, once-undamaged arm with a set of shaving razors, perfect for inflicting pain without doing too much damage. Then came Stavros, who plunged toothpick after toothpick in under the screaming and sobbing man's (most history books refer to him as "screeching beast") nails with no mercy whatsoever, unlike the Briton. "You violated our countries, our people, Comrade Stalin, you raped them, you burnt them, you killed them, now, Greece, and all the countries of Central Europe will have justice. You will understand what you did to them and thus understand why you must die in pain." Stavros growled as he finished his assigned part.

Carville had already had to go get a new bucket of cold water… so Hannah, long since seeing a red haze over her vision from sheer rage, took up the slack. She used a fillet knife to stab into Stalin's groin directly above his dick and with a short turn sever the tendon holding the erectile tissue to the pelvic bones, glad Stalin was thoroughly tied down so he could not thrash and ruin her aim. After yanking his dick out as far as it could possibly go and stabbing a two-prong fork through it, with two quick slices she cut Stalin's dick into quarters lengthwise. She, as practiced, brought a torch under the butchered organ to scorch it and cook it before he could bleed too much. With another swipe of her blade she cut his balls off and passed them off to Carville who had come back with hot oil in a frying pan. The result was fried balls wrapped in human rinds (aka fried skin). "Stalin, this same sort of thing with women's nipples used to be your favourite secret snack, now it's time to give you a taste of your own medicine." Carville stated grimly, having thought up the idea after finding half a plate (the other half had been eaten already) of fried nipples in the freezer last night when he couldn't sleep, like the other generals, and had gone down there to remind himself why Stalin needed to be tortured to death. Most historians agree that Carville was deeply psychologically disturbed by his discovery (not to mention he threw up) and thus took it all out on Stalin… Essentially all historians also agree that Stalin deserved far more than the Allied generals gave him as punishment.

However, this, among other "War-Ender" kills (most kills for more apologetic or figurehead leaders such as Hirohito were far more merciful), began the "Great Feud" as it was known between Hannah Shepard and the Vatican, because they condemned her for avenging in this case a hundred million people in a painful way. It was of course an excuse to annoy Shepard over how she basically banned exclusively religious schooling from all her territories and enforced strictly secular and completely mandatory public education (bullying was kept in check enough that beating-ups were impossible to get away with, so the mandatory part didn't get many excuses for resistance). In fact, the feud was actually one of the main reasons why European Theatre actually did jack shit during World War Six many years later, but that was another matter entirely. Hannah on the other hand insisted that the Vatican during the Inquisition did far worse and actively fought the causes of science and progress to maintain its own power, and that they would do better to, as the Bible said, give some of their overwhelming wealth to the poor instead of annoying her and her client states constantly.

The only reason Stalin didn't gag to death on his own nuts, besides the fact that Carville had salted them to palatability (not so bland…), was that Tanya thought to slice them up. This was moments before she started shoving quarters down the man's throat, long since gone silent from screaming as they methodically cauterized his wounds. They prevented him from hyperthermia by dumping cold water (Carville's small bucket was very useful) on him to help negate the heat input by the torch still barbecuing his dick.

"Well, that looks satisfactory to me, what about you, Tanya?" Hannah questioned, her cousin looked over and prodded the cooked area with a poker before nodding agreeably. "Well, Stalin, you've eaten the vulvas of enough women, it's time for you to get another taste of your own medicine. By the way, to those who are listening and don't know, the vulva is the external part of a woman's reproductive system. Stalin liked them in various ways, and his favourite tool to extract one is a filleting knife, this sort of knife." She waved her knife in front of the camera "He will understand why he must die this way, and he shall be glad we didn't spit-roast him like some of the women in the freezer. The way he cut the women up worked the same way as the female genital mutilations still being performed LEGALLY today in the United States. They will be avenged, mark my words, all motherfuckers out there who force their daughters into this stuff, they too will be avenged should the day ever come for final justice."

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><p>AN (Author's Note): Even today, in most US states, female genital mutilation is legal, and so it will be here. There are some reasons why some states will not be near-levelled during SI offensives of World War Six, this was one of them, on the other hand, communities encouraging this travesty were blasted into oblivion. Those too far gone to be saved were given mercy while those women and girls who hated it or the idea of it (for those not yet butchered) will be assimilated into a more protective society.

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><p>Archivists' Note: The enforcement of the sudden laws on female and even male genital cuttings will be covered in Part 4 of the Archives. Noticeably, they didn't include war criminals in the protected lists, but that's for Part 4…<p>

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><p>The camera turned to look through the open door of the freezer at the parts and whole bodies strung up inside before turning back to the generals and Stalin. "I hope the world understands why this must be so." Hannah stated grimly before grabbing the large two-prong fork that she had stabbed through Stalin's roasted dick to hold it in place and dragging it out onto a ceramic plate that Tanya held. The cooked tissues had already been detached enough that with a good yank they were free. Then Tanya grabbed the handle she'd affixed to the large, relatively short drill bit she had been heating over Hannah's torch and plugged the hole (the sound of sizzling was clearly audible as the man could no longer scream effectively) as the general stood up and stood the fork on a rack to cool a bit while Carville gave Stalin ANOTHER small pail of cold water as he had fainted yet again from sheer pain. Then Tanya began to deliver a soliloquy on the number of women and even men raped by Soviet soldiers on their way east (over ten million) versus the number of soldiers disciplined for it (roughly zero). She elaborated on how many known cases of rape had occurred as the Allies marched east (exactly 11, all to NKVD personnel) and how many soldiers had been disciplined for it (12, three were shot and the rest dishonourably discharged and basically on parole after two months each in jail, the sentence would have been heavier but for the fact that the victims were NKVD i.e. Stalin's Gestapo bitches). "Ten million violated people deserve some justice, and now that Stalin understands what it feels like to have a long, hard, unwanted object rammed up one's crotch, we need to ask him why the hell his soldiers raped MEN too as they went west." She snorted "It's most likely because they learned from their leader, so let us investigate closely just how much Comrade Stalin likes this" She tore the drill bit out of the essentially-cauterized hole, bringing another scream "shoved up there."<p>

The camera swung away to only leave the Allied generals standing on one side wincing and making various expressions of near-pity before Hannah waved a platter with a pair of frozen, baked (with barbecue sauce) breasts under their noses and their faces hardened again. Off-screen… Stalin had lost control of his bowels (he'd already pissed himself when Hannah sliced up his dick) "you dared shit on my hand? I'm so glad I'm wearing surgical gloves… Take that, and THAT!" There was a lot of gagging and choking "You want to wash your mouth out? Fine, I'm surprised you dislike intestinal contents given you like human meat sausages made with the stuffed intestines of the women you butchered yourself." A splash of water and spluttering sounded while the other generals made violent gestures and waved their fists up and down in quiet cheering as if at a sports game. Hannah on the other hand was fetching a bunch of sausage links from the fridge to encourage their anger "Alright, you've had enough of that for now, huh? Hannah, is the thing cooled enough now?"

"Yeah, let me just return these to the fridge…" Hannah Shepard came back after putting away the human meat sausages and picked up the big fork thing before bringing it over. "Alright, Stalin, you've eaten enough genitals before, open your damned mouth." His eyes were wide and he shook his head vehemently "It's not your choice anywhere, now open or I'll shoot you."

"Shoot me then…" his tone of relief dissolved into a scream as Hannah yanked out her pistol and fired a shot from straight above his nipple, the bullet burying itself in his foot, having torn his nipple off as it went. It was the same sort of thing Stalin had done with several victims, except he'd use them as a shooting gallery and had the bullet-ridden corpses preserved and mounted on a wall. The lunatic's deafening scream turned into a half-choke as she stuffed half of the barbecued dick in and forced him to chew quickly and then swallow.

"Open up again." Tanya yanked his jaw open this time before Hannah stuffed the rest of it in. "Alright, how was that?" She asked, without waiting for a rely, she smirked "Good, now it's time to draw you. Tanya, you going to handle this or will I?"

"I'll deal with it, he gutted Germany's industries, slaughtered enough cities, now it's time for us to gut him. Tanya, where do we start?" Von Esling finally stepped up to bat. "All five of us filed our resignations already to ensure we could in good conscience deliver the justice he deserves to this animal, this Stalin, let's finish this."

"There." She gestured simply with her filleting knife that she'd picked up again.

"The hole is a bit too small… unless we're going to expand it, of course."

"Didn't you see the group of those plasticized woman who was gutted through their vaginas?" Hannah stated in an ice-cold voice, heaving a sigh at the memory "It's doable, if he bleeds, it's irrelevant. You'll get to strangle him with his own guts if you want to and are fast enough about gutting him."

"No, he has enough of a gut fetish he'd die turned-on, and we wouldn't want that." Von Esling's sense of nausea was suppressed by sheer rage like the other generals, so he donned surgical gloves like everyone else had and pulled one of the large aprons stored in the room over his front "Stalin, it's time for you to taste what your troops did to my country and what you personally did to most of the poor women who died in this dungeon." He jammed his hand through the hole, grabbed whatever he wrapped his hand around, and squeezed hard before pulling out slowly.

Stalin fainted again, as his prostate had just been completely and painfully crushed in the iron grip of the German Supreme Commander. Gunter held it out to his old boss after shoving Tanya's second drill bit, used for cauterization as the first was still jammed up Stalin's ass, in there to stop the blood flow (he was surprised that he) "What is this?"

"That's his prostate, from which most of the liquid volume of the semen with which he desecrated the bodies of so many women came. By the way, in case you've forgotten, he specifically searched for women with brown eyes, black hair, and full breasts, in other words, he was looking for women who bore a physical resemblance to me, this is a personal war… all of this is a personal war, especially for Stalin, all he wanted was to be the mad dictator of the world, and he was willing to butcher hundreds of millions to get his goal. For that, let's talk to his victims while you see if there's anything not totally rotten inside him."

The next ten minutes were spent holding the mike to the mutilated women who had once all been attractive but were now missing parts ranging from limbs to digits to eyes to lips, ears, noses, and so on, all sporting scars, burn marks, and such. After Gunter finally reported "We're done here" the last of the fifteen or so survivors finished speaking of the horrors inflicted upon her now-limbless body. They had, halfway through the group, had to find someone to talk for another 16-year-old girl whose vocal cords had been burnt out by Stalin shoving a flexible torch of burning reeds down her throat for entertainment one rainy afternoon a couple months ago. One of the other survivors had witnessed the burning and spoken for her, and the victim had nodded confirmation to all of it.

But they had gone through the survivors one by one, with the translator keeping up, and the camera swept back to show Stalin's guts, still connected inside, pooling at his feet through the hole between his legs where his dick and balls used to be. Gunter was on the edge of the frame, washing his hands before peeling off the gloves and discarding them "Duke, you get to strike the match."

"One last thing" Hannah stated grimly. Everyone else stepped aside wordlessly as she stepped up before Stalin. Cocking her head to one side she snorted "So ends the high and mighty dictator, responsible for killing thirty million of his own citizens before the Third World War and killing anther hundred million on all sides during that war. The world has had most of its justice, so it has come time for you to open yourself to the world and rest… forever."

The others were about to speak about this deviation from the plan before Hannah raised her knife. One quick slice beneath the diaphragm and another quick slice beneath the belly button but just above the pelvic bones followed by a centerline slice opened Stalin's half-empty abdominal cavity to the eyes of the world. Hannah Shepard, completely enraged by what she had witnessed and how many had died due to this THING before her, grabbed the two folds and stretched them away from each other to show how emptied Stalin was. She shook her head to clear it a little and stepped back from the bloody wreckage that she, Tanya, Von Esling, Carville, Leclerc, Stavros, and Duke had created.

There was a long moment of silence from the outside of the building before someone shouted something, followed by a great roar that rose too shake the very ground. The thunderous cheering of millions of Allied troops and Soviets, both military and civilian, who were seeing the event televised to them through big screens and speakers mounted on the front of the Kremlin for this event was audible even in the basements of the Kremlin. This was natural given that they had left the secret garage doors open to let fresh air and sound in. "Remember, men, the principles of communism, of socialism, have nothing wrong with them. Lenin had a dream that was not so terrible, but this monster, this animal, this thing" She gestured at Stalin or what was left of him "mutated Lenin's ideals beyond all recognition, that was why the Soviet Union became a fascist police state. Do not hate Communism, every social system has its faults, capitalism, socialism, democracy, dictatorships, all of them have their faults, do not hate any idea, hate those who pervert the idea to their own benefits. Evil may rise again and again, but the good people of the world will burn it to ashes every time." She picked up a metal can and twisted the cap off while the other Generals and Tanya did the same to other metal cans they had grabbed off counters and such. They splashed the diesel fuel all over Stalin before Edmund Duke struck a match, passing it reverently to Gunter. The German Supreme Commander stared at the flickering light for a long moment… and tossed it casually at the petroleum-drenched remnant of the megalomaniac.

The flames caught almost instantly and embroiled the madman, too far gone to even scream, in a cloak of fire. He thrashed as best he could, but the fire clung stubbornly to him. The generals watched quietly, placidly, as did the world, knowing full well that this was not only the funeral pyre of a megalomaniacal madman, but the funeral pyre of the Third World War, a war which could easily have gone on to be as terrible as the Apocalypse itself. The world watched the crackling of the flames until they finally died down, and all those in it rejoiced, for the Third World War… was over.

None of the six generals (or five generals and a head of state) involved were ever blamed or condemned by the general public for this, and all five generals had their resignations turned down. This was partly because Hannah and Jane had obtained full and written permission from every Allied and Allied-oriented government to "terminate Joseph Stalin in as painful a manner as physically possible given the pain he has inflicted on his own country and the entire world". Of course, there was also the fact that they censored significant parts of the video and that winners wrote history. Sure, there was an "uncut edition" available to the public from SI, but very few were willing to buy or even see it after the disturbing parts they were shown of Stalin's crimes and burning. Given Hannah's public image of never doing anything that was not righteous and/or totally necessary, most of the public was thoroughly convinced that she had done the right thing. This was reinforced by the fact that the broadcast had begun with a tour of the gallery and ended with the film of Stalin burning being overlapped with another, slower tour of the gallery of dead/frozen women and parts thereof, displaying Stalin's crimes even as he burned before the video faded to black (for the troops in Red Square, it was done by turning down the projectors' brightness).

In the utter darkness that followed, Hannah Shepard's voice echoed in the loudspeakers and in the recording "Over ten million women and even men were raped by Stalin's soldiers as they marched west. Financial damage to the countries of Europe and the Soviet Union are estimated to exceed one and a half trillion pounds sterling. One hundred million people lost their lives needlessly in the war, and another thirty million Soviets died in Stalin's purges. Stalin's death was painful, but it was necessary given what he had done. Three hundred women died by torture and cannibalism in his dungeons in the past three years, all out of spite at my forces beating his back repeatedly. Let it be remembered, let there never be another such war. Let the Third World War be the last World War. Peoples of the Earth, let us join our hands together and work toward peace as friends, as brothers and sisters, as equals. Let there never be a Fourth World War. That is all I can ask of you. That is all I am worthy of asking you for. Let there be peace in our world, for our time." The Russian translation was played, and Red Square erupted into another dull roar of agreement as the lights came back on. The darkness of the night fled before the coming of the light… the world had emerged from a dark era into a new dawn…

Or so everyone thought.

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><p>AN: I feel unclean, desecrated, damaged to even have written this chapter, however, it will be nothing (especially emotionally) compared to how I plan to have happen to certain main characters (cough Tali cough) in other fics, and gave me good practice. I am deeply disturbed by what I wrote, and it was hard to proofread without feeling sick… choosing to specialize in studying biology really did me a lot of favours for keeping my lunch down.

Part 4 of SI Archives is already available!

REVIEW (NO FLAMERS, I DID put a Disclaimer about the content, and Stalin was this evil if not more in our real history)!


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